Development of Material Tester Using Pendulum

Abstract

The requirements for evaluating the mechanical characteristics of materials have increased in the various industrial, research and the applications such as materials testing. Therefore, the authors have proposed a method for measuring force acting a material using pendulum [1]. In the Material tester, the mechanical characteristics of material against small force are measured by means of the pendulum mechanism based on the levitation mass method (LMM) [2,3,4].In the LMM, the Doppler shift frequency is measured for measuring the inertial force. The Doppler shift frequency of a laser beam reflected from the mass is accurately measured by using optical interferometer. The velocity, position, acceleration and inertia force of the mass are calculated from the measured time-varying Doppler shift frequency. Thus, the accurate measure of frequency makes that of force.