A Light Portable Frame for Mechanical Testing

In this paper, it is presented an open hardware based high precision frame for mechanical tests on small-to-medium size samples under the loads up to 500N (tested for loads up to 1000N) that can be supported by the contact-less Digital Image Correlation based observations. The key feature of the testing frame is that it can be used in either vertical or horizontal setup. It can be actually adjusted in a generic plane in order to neglect or impose gravitational forces on a specimen in a required direction. the frame has been used to test soft silicone (meta)material samples and product prototypes as e.g. PCB solder joints in miniaturized electronic devices, various 3D printed prototypes and most importantly for educational purposes with limited load capacity to 50N that were considered safe to be manipulated by students without any specific safety measures. The commercial variant of the frame is foreseen as a tool to support proper design of expensive experiments in a proof-of-concept phase in academic institutions and/or R&D departments of private bodies.