Linear Rail Fatigue Tester

The Mei group is currently exploring the design and synthesis of organic semiconductors and conductors for printed electronic circuits. An important stage of the project is to fatigue test the coatings in order to predict their reliability in actual use. Prior to construction of the Linear Rail Fatigue Tester, the group would manually bend the flexible device by hand, simply counting repetitions.

The group provided multiple papers describing custom made fatigue testers currently used by other labs, we decided on the the technique shown below:

The finished device was constructed with a commercially available linear rail - stepper motor assembly, and completed using custom 3D printed hardware and a custom designed printed circuit board featuring a Teensy 4.1 microcontroller running software created by the Amy facility specifically for this project.

The custom software for the device allows the user to control start and stop endpoints of the fatigue test, as well as the speed and number of total fatigue cycles.