Facilities and Equipment

Experimental facilities

Impact

• Bird strike set-up for real birds and gelatine replicas
• Pneumatic launcher
• Two drop weight towers (3 m and 6 m)
• Pendulum impact test rig for glass windows
• Lab-scale set-up for slamming wave impact
• Three digital high speed cameras (up to 250,000 fps)
• High-end transient recorder/oscilloscope (up to 100 MHz sampling rate)
• Charpy impact tests (dynamic fracture toughness)
• Dynamic load cells, accelerometers, displacement sensors

Fatigue

• Two servohydraulic machines
• Accessoiries for tension-compression and pure shear testing
• Devices for 3- and 4-point bending
• Two extensometers
• Electrical resistance measurement

NDT/NDE

• 3D LDV
• Thermographic camera
• 2D and 3D Digital Image Correlation (static and high-speed)
• Optical fibre sensors and read-out equipment (up to 2 kHz)
• Ultrasound phased array (64 probes)
• Shadow and projection moire
• Ultrasound scanning facility for C-scans and polar scans
• Schlieren set-up for acousto-optics research

General mechanics of composite materials

• Electromechanical testing machine with temperature chamber (-150 C to +350 C)
• Electrodynamic shaker (up to 10 kHz)
• Laser vibrometer
• Set-up for measurement of modal frequencies and frequency-dependent modal damping
• Test set-ups for static and dynamic testing of racing bicycle frames
• Fracture mechanics tests for composites and polymers (DCB, ENF, ELS, TDCB, CT)
• Fracture mechanics tests for adhesives (dolly testing, DCB testing)
• Long-term experience with outdoor field testing without electrical grid connection (sailing yachts, wave energy devices, bicycle frames,…)
• Hand lay-up and vacuum assisted resin transfer moulding
• Infrared welding set-up
• Autoclave with cure monitoring
• Filament winding machine
• Measurement of fibre volume fraction of carbon and glass fibre composites

Numerical facilities

Commercial software

• Implicit and explicit finite element suite ABAQUS
• Explicit finite element code LS-Dyna
• Open source finite element code Code_Aster
• HyperMesh and Gmsh high-performance finite-element pre-processors
• Composite draping software (Catia/CPD, Simulayt/Composite Modeler)
• Software for kinematics and multibody dynamics (Universal Mechanism)
• Optimization software (iSight, evolutionary strategies)
• Numerical software (Mathcad, Matlab, Maple, Mathematica)
• CAD/CAE software (SolidWorks, Catia)
• Data acquisition software (LabVIEW)

In-house developments

• SERVE: Statistically Equivalent Representative Volume Element (RVE) software
• ORAS: Object-Oriented RVE Assembly Software
• Blade Mesher: meshing tools for large wind turbine blades
• Five workstations for intensive calculations
• ¨Parallel computing infrastructure for finite element calculations (12000+ cores, 3.2 Terabyte RAM)
• Supernode with 720 GB RAM