Why is materials testing important in the industrial sector?

Most industrial fields today do not understand their manufacturing processes without a materials testing phase, which is carried out with testing equipment. The importance of materials testing lies in the fact that it is precisely thanks to this process that the quality, safety and efficiency conditions required for the parts or products to be produced can be guaranteed.

Perhaps a few examples will make it easier to understand. A company that manufactures bumpers for automobiles, before starting to mass-produce these products, must test whether the material used to manufacture them is sufficiently resistant to absorb the energy of possible impacts, thus avoiding major damage.

A company that manufactures electronic components must test whether the materials it is going to work with are able to withstand certain conditions of high temperatures, for example. The pharmaceutical industry must test whether the packaging in which it will supply its products is sufficiently resistant to protect a cream under optimum conditions. The packaging industry must check that the plastics or cartons it has chosen to market a product are strong enough to protect what is inside them as expected.

Unlike what may appear at first glance, materials testing is an essential process in any industry. Materials testing is an essential process in construction, automotive, aeronautics and metallurgy, among many other fields. In fact, in most cases the industrial production phase of any part or product does not start if the relevant materials testing has not been carried out beforehand.

If this is not the case, a company could be producing an enormous quantity of parts or products that will not serve the purpose for which they were designed..

Materials testing is used to test the physical, mechanical and chemical properties of a material before it is used in the manufacture of a product or part. Some materials change their properties when they are handled, and materials testing can determine what their new properties are.

The objective of any materials test is to guarantee the quality, durability, safety and accuracy of a material under specific circumstances…

There is no universal materials testing equipment that can be used in all cases, but each industry and each manufacturing process requires a specific test equipment. For this reason, at DEIMA we manufacture 100% customized and made-to-measure test equipment, which are adjusted to the real and specific needs of each industry.

You don’t need the same test equipment to test the damping capacity of a bumper as you do to measure the aerodynamics of a vehicle. At DEIMA we design, manufacture and build customized materials testing equipment so that our customers can submit the materials they are going to work with to real or simulated conditions in order to determine their validity and make the appropriate adjustments to obtain a product of optimum quality.

Obviously there are different types of materials testing and one or the other is applied depending on what needs to be tested or what is expected from the final product.

Materials testing can be classified into different types depending on what the final objective is. The destructive tests are those that apply certain loads to product samples in order to determine the maximum load they can withstand and also to know how the material behaves under these circumstances. Another type of tests are non-destructive tests, which consist of subjecting materials to certain circumstances without destroying them in order to determine how they behave.

According to the type of load applied to the materials, we can speak of static tests, which serve to measure tensile, compressive or bending loads on materials; dynamic tests, when material samples are subjected to sudden loads or loads that act periodically; cyclic tests, when materials are subjected to recurring load cycles; or impact tests, which as the name implies subject materials to impacts to see how they react.