Design of a Compact Fatigue Tester for Testing Irradiated Materials

A compact fatigue testing machine that can be easily inserted into a hot cell for characterization of irradiated materials is beneficial to help determine relative fatigue performance differences between new and irradiated material. Hot cell use has been carefully considered by limiting the size and weight of the machine, simplifying sample loading and test setup for operation via master-slave manipulator, and utilizing an efficient design to minimize maintenance. Funded from a US-Japan collaborative effort, the machine has been specifically designed to help characterize titanium material specimens. These specimens are flat cantilevered beams for initial studies, possibly utilizing samples irradiated at other sources of beam. The option to test spherically shaped samples cut from the T2K vacuum window is also available. The machine is able to test a sample to 10⁷ cycles in under a week, with options to count cycles and sense material failure. The design of this machine will be presented along with current status.
Proceedings of the 6th Int. Particle Accelerator Conf., IPAC2015, Richmond, VA, USA