Shear test

[Jay]

Dear Dr. Bergstrom

I am planing to do a series of experiments as in you Ph.D Thesis.
There are some questions that maybe you can give me some help.
1. Are your tests follow any test standards (like ASTM or...)?
I am specially interested in shear test, it seems hard to do it in your way.
Is the specimen the same as in compression test (cylinder)?
How do you fix the specimen?
How do you measure the shear strain?

2. The max compression strain of my structure is about 0.3, what is the max strain should I do in shear test and plane strain test?

Thank you.

[Jorgen]

Hello Jay,

The tests that I ran were not strictly following any ASTM standard.

I used both cylindrical and brick-shaped specimens for the double lap shear tests. Either approach worked fine. I applied a strong adhesive to fix the specimen to the test fixture. This approach gives good results but is quite inconvenient.

I did not measure the shear strain, in fact, there is no test that directly measures strain. What I did was to simply measure the displacement and calculated the strain from that displacement.

About max strain, I would expose the specimen to a strain slightly larger than the max strain that you expect to see in the real application.

Best of luck,
Jorgen