2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Improved Student Comprehension Through Student-Designed Tensile Testing Laboratory

Labs greatly enhance students' understanding by bringing to life often abstract concepts and equations. However, executing effective laboratory coursework for engineering courses is difficult because of a lack of preparedness students generally have for lab coursework. Another issue students experience is developing a thorough understanding of what the lab is teaching and retaining that knowledge. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the discipline of manufacturing processes and the study of material properties in material science.

Material properties lie at the heart of many engineering disciplines, as materials are what engineers incorporate in their disciplines. The study of material properties can be greatly accelerated in engineering courses by integrating a hands-on approach to the creation and testing of laboratory experiments through inquiry-based experiential learning. This approach will be achieved by allowing students to create, design, test, and write their own laboratory manual as well as experimental procedures, which will result in a holistic, hands-on approach to an integrated laboratory course. Through this approach, students will be required to understand on a deeper level what they are achieving in laboratory coursework, and in doing so, will foster learning about the laboratory procedure and theory.

Students designed a lab to test four different ¾” diameter test specimen composed of stainless and low-carbon steel, aluminum, and brass rods to determine the corresponding material properties of Young’s modulus, yield strength, and ultimate strength. A high speed camera was used to video record the details of the fracturing process. The ESL Test II Intelligent Materials Test System with software was measuring continuously the applied force using a load cell and resulting elongation of the test specimen was measured with an extensometer. Students identified the material properties from stress-strain curves using data acquired from a Satec hydraulic tensile testing machine and extensometer. Ansys Explicit Dynamics simulations were included in order to offer a comparison using computational tools to compare with experimental testing. Ansys simulations offered the students a deeper understanding of the computational tools used in industry. Finally, students formally developed a laboratory assessment procedure to document and measure student learning outcomes. Implementing this strategy in engineering laboratory coursework will allow students to better understand and call upon this skill set in their future engineering careers.