Mission
The ACMTRL (Advanced Composite Materials and Textile Research Laboratory) located on the University of Massachusetts Lowell campus offers your company a resource for research and testing. The ACMTRL has as its charter the task of developing a better understanding of the design, analysis, and manufacture of high performance composite materials and textile structures. The laboratory is interested in collaborative projects and in providing support and technology transfer to industry and government agencies.
The Advanced Composite Materials and Textile Research Laboratory is involved in active integration of analytical modeling, experimentation, and numerical simulation to understand the behavior of fiber-reinforced, polymer matrix composites. Our expertise in testing includes standard mechanical (e.g., tensile, compressive, flexural, short beam shear, impact, fracture, fatigue), thermal (CTE, DSC, DMA), and characterization (fiber volume fraction, void fraction, fiber orientation) studies, as well as the design of special fixturing for unique specimen geometries. Recent projects have included pull-out and shear testing of T-joint sandwich structures and fatigue testing of tapered fiberglass-balsa core sandwich structures. We have also conducted extensive work in the area of finite element analysis, including crashworthiness and impact models of all-composite automobiles and automotive components, simulations of composites forming, and static-loading models of T-joint sandwich.
Currently the laboratory has the capacity for in-house design, analysis, fabrication, and testing of advanced composite structures. A full complement of testing machines, fixtures and data acquisition systems are available for composite materials and textile characterization as per ASTM standards and for special configurations. The laboratory has the ability to fabricate specimens using standard techniques such as hand lay -up, braiding, filament winding, vacuum diaphragm forming, and press forming. The laboratory has full instrumentation capabilities to collect real time data and a photo microscopy system is available for all associated experiments.