On Monday, August, 24 ,2026 Al-Khwarizmi College of engineering held a master thesis defense in the field of Mechatronics engineering titled “Design and Implementation of a Miniature Mechanical Testing Apparatus to Investigate Small Scale Materials”, for the master candidate (Banin Abdel-Khaliq Abdel-Nabi) at the thesis defense hall, where a degree of passing with merit was awarded for her research findings.
The committee is composed of the following members:
- Assistant Professor Dr. Ahmed Mahrus Raghib, Chair
- Assistant Professor Dr. Ahmed Riydh Abbas, Examiner
- Assistant Professor Dr. Karim Nimah Salumi, Examiner
- Assistant Professor Dr. Furat Ibrahim Hussein, Supervisor
This study demonstrates the importance of Mechanical testing in determining the material properties in terms of tensile strength, compressive strength, and flexural strength- properties of critical importance in engineering design and development. With the increasing demand for miniaturization of components and parts used in industrial and research applications, the need arose for testing systems capable of handling microscopic and millimeter samples that require accurate measurements of loads and displacements.
The main objective of the current study is to design and build a miniature, low-cost, comprehensive testing system that performs tensile, compression, and bending tests to investigate the behavior of miniature samples under different loads. The implemented system involves a mechanical aluminum frame, a stepper motor-based drive system with lead screw for linear motion, a force measurement load cell, and a Linear variable differential transformer (LVDT) displacement sensor mounted in the direction of displacement. Arduino was used as a microcontroller, and the LabVIEW platform was used to control the device, data display, and acquisition in real time during testing. Specialized accessories were designed and applied to perform tensile, compression, and bending tests. A series of tests was conducted on various samples to verify the device’s reliability and efficiency.
The results showed the device’s ability to measure loads and displacements accurately and to plot stress-strain curves well. The experimental results showed that the tensile test gave an ultimate tensile strength of 258 MPa for the enameled copper wire, this is in agreement with the values reported in the data sheet for annealed copper wires (216-294 MPa). In addition, the three-point bending test gave a flexural strength of 7151 MPa (7.151 GPa) for the optical fiber (SMF-28), which is consistent with the failure stress range reported in the references for fused silica optical fibers (7.0–7.3 ± 0.1 GPa).
The compression test proved the ability of the developed device to perform micro-compression tests and to continuously acquire the related mechanical response.
The results obtained show the successful operation of the developed miniature testing system and indicate its potential as a low-cost and versatile platform for the characterization of the mechanical behavior of micro-scale materials.
