Belmar instrumented scratch test (MIT spinout)

Brendan Belmar's MIT doctoral thesis on metal-on-metal scratching scaled to a startup deriving the full stress-strain curve from groove geometry. Coupled with the DOT buried-pipe case as the customer.

Dr. Belmar, who gives some of these lectures during the school year, has started a company based on his doctoral thesis at MIT, where he was doing fundamental studies of friction rubbing of metal against metal. He did a PhD on scratching metal. Pretty exciting — if you read his thesis, you'd understand. He's a very practical person, and he's developing a test where you scratch a piece of metal and measure the groove: the depth of the scratch and how the metal rolls up along the side like a plow. You measure all that instead of getting one number, which is the hardness indentation depth. He gets the depth of the groove, the force it takes to plow the groove, and the height of the metal rolled up on the side. His intent — and he's done it theoretically, and now demonstrated experimentally — is to get the whole stress-strain curve by doing scratch testing with an instrumented scratch machine.