Affiliations 

  • 1 Department of Process and Food Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, Universiti Putra Malaysia, 43400, UPM, Serdang, Selangor, Malaysia
  • 2 Department of Process and Food Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, Universiti Putra Malaysia, 43400, UPM, Serdang, Selangor, Malaysia. Electronic address: afandi@upm.edu.my
  • 3 Graduate School of Life Science and Systems Engineering, Kyushu Institute of Technology, 2-4 Hibikino, Wakamatsu-ku, Kitakyushu, 808-0196, Japan
J Mech Behav Biomed Mater, 2019 09;97:58-64.
PMID: 31100486 DOI: 10.1016/j.jmbbm.2019.05.010

Abstract

This paper demonstrates the potential use of toy-bricks as the building block of a mechanical tensile testing instrument for the mechanical characterisation of natural fibres. A table-top tensile testing instrument was developed using LEGO parts (Mindstorms EV3 and Technics) and a 2 kg capacity load cell, whereas deformation modes were programmed in an open source programming language. Experimental work was conducted on oil palm fibres under different tensile modes (i.e. constant deformation, triple-twisted-tension and deformation-relaxation modes), which showed anisotropic-viscoelastic behaviour, and microstructural damages due to deformation.

* Title and MeSH Headings from MEDLINE®/PubMed®, a database of the U.S. National Library of Medicine.