Metallics
Many of the R-TECH materials staff have a career background in the metals industries and are qualified professional metallurgists. If you would like to speak to us today about our metal testing services, call us on 01656 748000
Many of the R-TECH materials staff have a career background in the metals industries and are qualified professional metallurgists. Although we have a particular specialism in testing steel for applications in structural concrete, our test equipment is equally capable of conducting a wide range of tests on many structural metallic materials. With test machines ranging from 10kN to 1500kN capacity, we will almost certainly have a machine appropriate to the dimensions and loads required by your samples.
Key Testing
Hardness Testing
The hardness of a material is defined as its ability to resist permanent deformation, either by scratching or indentation. Typically in engineering terms we typically think in terms of hardness as the ability to resist deformation from an indenter under a given compressive load. The hardness of a material can either by measured by the size of indent given by a specified load, or the amount of force required to indent a material. With metallic materials it is often possible to estimate the ultimate tensile strength from a simple hardness measurement.
SEM
The in-house Zeiss EVO 60 scanning electron microscope with Oxford INCA EDX microanalysis system nables magnification up to X50,000. This powerful imaging technique used for metallic and non-metallic materials is widely used for the examination of fracture surfaces, corrosion products, material defects etc. The Oxford INCA microanalysis system can also be used to identify the elemental composition of local areas on the specimen surface. This is an invaluable tool for the identification of corrosion products, contamination, identification of defect sources etc.
Chemical Analysis
A myriad of destructive and non-destructive techniques exists to analyse the chemical properties of materials. These techniques tend to vary greatly for non-metallics and metallics and there is often skill in identifying the correct technique for a given process or material. R-TECH’s laboratories include a comprehensive suite of chemical analysis techniques and where we cannot complete the test in-house, we have key partners in place to provide quick-turnaround of results.