First Industrial Strength Multi-Axial Robotic Testing Campaign for Composite Material Characterization

In this paper we are reporting on the first successful campaign of systematic, automated and massive multiaxial tests for composite material constitutive characterization. The 6 degrees of freedom system developed at the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) called NRL66.3, was used for this task. This was the in-augural run that served as the validation of the proposed overall constitutive characterization methodology. It involved accomplishing performing 1152 tests in 12 business days reaching a peak throughput of 212 tests per day. We describe the context of the effort in terms of the reasoning and the actual methods behind it. Finally, we present representative experimental data and associated constitutive characterization results for representative loading paths.