Mechanical Testing

CanmetMATERIALS’ mechanical testing laboratory performs a variety of standard mechanical tests, including tensile, compression and bending tests; Charpy impact tests; drop-weight tear tests (DWTT); fracture toughness tests; and creep, fatigue and crack growth tests. The lab is dedicated to developing novel test methodologies that meet research and industrial needs. Facilities include creep machines and several universal testing machines equipped with accessories, including a vacuum furnace, non-contact strain measuring devices such as a digital image correlation system and a video extensometer.

Through its state-of-the-art pipeline laboratory, CanmetMATERIALS has developed extensive expertise related to the preparation of artificial flaws, including fatigue pre-cracking, fully instrumented full-scale pipe tests, as well as small-scale specimens to evaluate susceptibility to stress-corrosion cracking.

CanmetMATERIALS’ mechanical testing laboratory in Calgary also has an X-ray diffractometer for materials characterization. This equipment is used to determine the amount of retained Austenite in steel and residual stress.

The unique capability of this equipment is that the X-ray tube is portable; when it is removed from the chamber, it is possible to obtain measurements of any size of specimen in the field.