Vision system for tensile testing

TPU has developed a high speed vision system for tensile testing. The system provides accurate timing between vision frames and tensile test data by use of FPGA timing.

The system is highly flexible and is build on Labview (FPGA) and National instruments Compact RIO hardware.

Vision is a usefull tool for laboratory testing in order to understand failure modes and obtain usefull verification based on measured data. For certain test types vision can also be used as extensometer (ie. obtain distance of selected area on tensile specimen).

The architecture of the implementation uses a FPGA (field programmable gate array) to perform the critical timing between vision frames and data acquisition. The timestamps are used during the handling of data and ensures that measured force data etc. is always accurate paired.