STRESS- STRAIN – TIME- TEMPERATURE

About Axel Products Inc.

Axel Products

Axel Products provides testing services for engineers and analysts. The focus is on the characterization of nonlinear materials such as elastomers and plastics. Data from the Axel laboratory is often used to develop material models in finite element analysis codes such as ABAQUS, ANSYS, Hexagon.Marc, Endurica and LS-Dyna. Testing services are also provided to examine sealing, fatigue problems, and high strain rate events.

Axel Products has one location in Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA. Our customers model truck tires, car crashes, missile seals, food objects and cataract lenses. Any company that performs structural simulation may be a user of Axel Products services. Axel was founded in 1994.

And for all customers, the services of Axel Products are proprietary. The customer owns the data and the story.

Developing and performing experiments to characterize materials in simulations has never been more exciting than now.  The radial biaxial test system was developed at Axel over 25 years ago to fit rubber models.  New iterations of the biaxial tester and other elastomer experiments continue today. The following images show biaxal testers for testing in air, in saline solution at 37C and at very low forces.

Our high strain rate experiments cover a wide range of forces and materials at strain rates up to 1000/s. Our latest high strain rate tester, an Instron VHS 160/100-20, is one of the fastest and most energetic systems in the world. It can move at 20 m/s while reacting a 100 kN force! Combined with Photron high speed cameras, the test results are absolutely amazing. These measurements defy our expectations, and they are a lot of fun to do! 

In our laboratory, cameras and digital image processing (DIC) continue to change strain measurement. We “see” material behaviors that defy our intuition. Watching DIC strain videos of tests never gets old.

A big part of laboratory operations is keeping the instruments working.  One aspect of this is the need to keep hydraulic test instruments cool.  This was costly and unreliable.  We have since added a geothermal based cooling system to keep our hydraulic systems running properly. Pipes with cooling water traverse the depths of the earth in ten, 100 meter deep geothermal wells. Heat from our hydraulic pumping units is reliably transferred to the earth in an environmentally friendly way.

In addition to the test system, support systems are needed to mill, cut, extract and condition test specimens. Sometimes, the real hard work isn’t the experiemnt, it is getting the specimens prepared and documented properly.

Thank you for visiting Axel Products!

Axel Products Inc.

2255 S. Industrial Hwy. Ann Arbor, MI 48104 USA

Email:

info@axelproducts.com

Phone:

+1-734-994-8308