Project Overview

A tribometer is a lab device that is used to study the friction and adhesive forces between the contact surface of the device and the measured specimen. Our team was tasked with developing a tribometer to be used specifically for soft materials such as PDMS, a rubber like material. There were many customer and engineering requirements that had to be considered during the design stages of the project. There was lots of engineering tools and development prior to a final design decision. Our final design can be seen below. The design consists of a rigid structure with what we called the component stack. The component stack from bottom to top consists of a turn handle at the base to raise and lower the component stack, a load cell to measure normal force, a torque sensor to measure friction between the specimen and thrust washer (contact point between device and PDMS rubber test specimen), a mirror housing so that a camera can be added in the future for optical observance and data cocreation), and glass specimen holder. The Turn handle raises the component stack to the desired normal force readout from the loadcell which is displayed on a computer. The thrust washer is then spun by a stepper motor mounted at the top of the structure and is controlled by a power supply, stepper motor driver, Arduino and Graphical User Interface (GUI). The GUI and Arduino code was fully made in house and controls the stepper motor and RPM, displays and records data from the load cell.

Google Drive: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1CWEWp60fwg8het1xG0DHFZPDSJWHr4Sy?usp=sharing