How can you measure compressive strength?

[LatexZone]

It's a really tricky one to work out, but does anyone have any suggestions of how to measure compressive strength?

Thanks a lot.

 

[radou]

Compressive strength of a material is measured experimentally. The apparatus plots a stress-strain curve and when the material crushes, the value of the stress is called the limit compressive strength. I'm not really sure what you are asking.

 

[LatexZone]

How can you measure compressive strength, that's what I'm asking xD

Not sure how else to put it :'(

 

[LatexZone]

One of them would be a vice grip maybe. Any others?

 

[Studiot]

Well it rather depends upon the material.

You can measure it directly by crushing a specimen in a in a calibrated press as Radou has described, or you can measure indirectly by testing a suitably shaped bending specimen to destruction.

 

[RTW69]

ASTM (American Society Testing Materials) has standards on how to test different materials. You can purchase the standards from their website. Basically you have a load cell attached to a motorized piston that simultaneously measures the force and compressive distance on a sample to failure. The samples must be a uniform size and composition.

 

[RTW69]

This might be a DIY approach. The difficult thing to measure is how far the specimen compresses before failure. Get a screw clamp and determine how far the screw end travels with every let's say 1/2 turn. You will still need a load cell to measure force but you should be able to equate force with displacement if the sample is not to brittle. It is worth a try.