Course Description: This course presents a comprehensive overview of experimental techniques used to develop phenomenological understanding of solid mechanics as well as those routinely employed for nondestructive evaluation of in-service structures, structural components, and structural materials. Experimental Mechanics topics include:
- review of elementary plane elasticity
- strain gage theory, application, and analysis techniques
- photoelastic stress analysis, and
- thermoelectric stress analysis.
Nondestructive evaluation topics include:
- surface hardness methods
- penetration resistance methods
- stress wave propagation techniques (ultrasonic pulse velocity, impact-echo, ultrasonic testing (UT), sonic pulse velocity)
- vibration techniques (resonant frequency, impulse response, modal analysis)
- corrosion evaluation of reinforcement
- liquid penetrant testing (PT)
- magnetic particle testing (MT)
