Test Frame Design for the Characterization of Additive Manufacturing Compliant Materials

This work presents a design of a 6 degree of freedom (DOF) robotic test frame designed to provide multiple and combined loading scenarios for additive manufacturing (AM) materials. The need is to provide a more in-depth look into the material properties of nonlinear anisotropic materials as traditional uniaxial or biaxial test frames have been shown to be inefficient in providing accurate material property values. With the application of surrogate models with General Purpose Graphics Processing (GPGPU) computing, “real-time” characterization is achievable. The work provided is a next generation 6 DOF test frame designed to reducing costs, increasing workspace, and reducing overall size over previous designs.