Development of a fatigue test machine for high frequency applications

In this research, a complete system of a force control unit implemented on a home-built electro-mechanical fatigue test machine is proposed. The entire system includes an electro-mechanical shaker, a load cell, a controller, dedicated software, and an external metallic structure to constrain the specimen. Admittedly, the bending fatigue test on flat specimen has to be measured by applying a cyclic force with a constant frequency. The simplicity of the machine and its cheap overall price are the most important advantages of the proposed system. Moreover, the machine has been designed based on the specimens suggested in ASTM standard Bending Fatigue Testing for coating samples. For demonstration of machine functionality in this paper, the measured results of some fatigue tests have been presented in order to show the efficiency of the system. In this regard, Aluminium flat specimens were deposited by Bronze through cold spray coating and they have been used as samples for test. The results show that the machine is capable of following the perquisite requirements mentioned in the ASTM standard.