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Online materials testing laboratory

As part of our work developing Expedition Workshed (http://www.expeditionworkshed.org/), we are creating an virtual materials testing laboratory. With more and more civil engineering departments being forced to shut down their materials labs, fewer and fewer students get the chance to see how materials behave under load. We created the Materials Room on Workshed to link together really high-quality resources that show how different materials behave.

Read an overview of Expedition Workshed

Visit the Materials

Read about our stunning videos of concrete exploding under compression.

With more and more universities shutting the doors to the materials testing labs, fewer and fewer students get the opportunity to witness material behaviour first hand – to witness the brittle behaviour of an under-reinforced beam; or to watch a bolt tear through a sheet of metal. For those students who can visit a material testing lab, the experience is often a one-off, without the opportunity to review and closely interrogate what they see.

We designed Stuff Failure to be an online materials testing laboratory where students can watch these tests over and over again. Of course, producing videos of material testing and posting them online is nothing new. Unfortunately the collection of materials online is of relatively poor quality and the range of easily available material is surprisingly limited.

To produce our videos, we have made careful consideration of framing, lighting and camera speed. The use of high-speed allows us to view details invisible to the naked eye. The intention is for these clips to be as memorable as the iconic shadow graph image of the shock waves produced by a bullet travelling at high speed that many of us may remember.