Solid Mechanics Lab (P118)

Students taking the Introduction to Engineering and Solid Mechanics courses primarily use the solid mechanics lab. The lab has locked storage for design projects, test stands for solid mechanics experiments, and strain gage measurement systems. In the Introduction to Engineering course, students build robots using the LEGO Mindstorm system. These robots compete in two different events. The first event has two robots racing towards each other. The winning robot is the robot with its center of gravity closest to the center of the ramp. In the other event, robots must switch off six randomly placed lights in a maze. In Solid Mechanics, the students use the lab to conduct a series of experiments on the deflection of bodies under different loading conditions. These experiments allow students to visualize and apply their textbook learning.

Equipment

• Six testing frames
• Six strain gage readout boxes
• Equipment for attaching strain gages
• Optical strain gage system
• Weights for loading objects
• Six laptop-based data acquisition systems using LabVIEW