2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Basic engineering mechanics courses typically cover conventional construction materials such as steel, aluminum, cast iron, and concrete. These materials have been well studied and have consistent material properties. Experimentally testing these materials in a laboratory setting help students visualize the difference between the failure behavior of ductile materials such as steel and aluminum and brittle materials such as cast iron and concrete. However, there are thousands of other materials which are commonly used in industry and academia which exhibit different behaviors or are more inconsistent between samples. These materials also behave differently when subjected to different loading conditions such as tension, torsion, or impact. Many colleges and universities might not have the equipment to conduct these experiments, the resources to purchase different materials, or the time to conduct a large variety of tests in class or in a laboratory course. This project investigated the development of visual aids to help students better understand the behavior of a wide variety of different materials under different loading conditions. There were three specific types of visual aids that were created. The first was a display board where undeformed and failed samples due to uniaxial tension and pure torsion for 12 different materials were mounted for students to observe side to side. The 12 different materials included steel, aluminum, cast iron, PBS (3D printed at different orientations), acrylic, wood, and others. The specimens are mounted to the board with custom 3D printed grips so that students can remove the samples and observe their failure more closely. The boards can also be customized to include samples tested under different loading conditions such as Charpy V-Notch tests, where samples with different heat treatments were tested and compared. The second type of visual aid was high speed videos of failure under uniaxial tension and pure torsion. Students can watch these videos to observe different behaviors and fractures. It is often challenging for students to observe these tests in a laboratory setting due to the size of the samples and number of students in the laboratory, so these videos could also be used to supplement in-class experiments. The final visualization which was created was polarizing light videos on acrylic samples which could be used to observe stress concentrations in experimentally loaded samples. These visualizations may be used in introductory courses such as Mechanics of Materials or advanced courses such as Machine Component Design. This paper will detail the design and creation of each of the visualizations. Future research will assess the impact these visualizations have on student comprehension of different material behaviors and failure modes.