ZwickRoell supports product development at Abeking & Rasmussen

Abeking & Rasmussen is a shipyard at Lemwerder on the Ufer (Germany) with a long tradition of ship and yacht-building. The yard's 400 or so employees build premium-quality specialized vessels such as minesweepers, official vessels and speedboats, together with motor and sailing yachts for discerning customers around the world. The emphasis is on longevity, elegance and technical perfection. ZwickRoell has assisted Abeking & Rasmussen in specifying a suitable test method for assessing new fasteners.

As these items are exposed to dynamic loadings during their lives, fatigue strength is a highly relevant factor In tests the components are subjected to tensile and compression loadings. To maximize speed and cost-effectiveness in these tests, which involve up to 10 million cycles, Abeking & Rasmussen have decided to employ Vibrophore 100. This testing machine generates a dynamic load through an oscillating system working in full resonance mode. The key advantage of this testing system is the high testing frequencies, resulting in shorter test times. Despite this the system only uses around 2% of the energy of a comparable servo-hydraulic testing machine. By using suitable additional devices, both static and dynamic testing can be performed under various environmental conditions (temperature, aggressive media), together with torsion and flexure tests.