Designing and Building of Thermal Fatigue Testing Machine for Stone

Abstract

This report summarizes the experimental, design, and modeling work that was performed in this project for developing a thermal fatigue test for stone. This project helps the Palestinian stone industry by providing a tool for stone quality testing which would assist in import, export activities. thermal fatigue test make by provision the circumstance which lead the stone become a failure, the thermal fatigue test is divided into heating and cooling process. Each process is need to analysis and model to obtaining the relationship between the temperature and time. After constructing the full thermal machine, the obtained temperature-time curves provided for the full cycle, were compared with the measured actual curves. PIC microcontroller is used to control the whole system with a logic control, the actuator transfer the specimen between two process several times by insert number of cycles, insert the time which needed to heating and cooling process and the required temperature each of these configuration specified in start of operation by human machine interface. The final product is a mechatronics system for heating and cooling processes. In future works, this product can be developed to become more intelligent, by adding other tasks to it. These additional tasks could be observing the crack by other tools such as image processing (IM) tools or other observations.