Measurement Setup and Execution of the Measurement
The tensile and compression tests are carried out in the laboratories of the Karlsruhe University of Applied Sciences to test the material connection of the strain gauges to the carbon fibre-reinforced plastic tube and to evaluate whether future tests would work on the moving vehicle.
For this purpose, the control arms are clamped in the testing machine. This is done using a specially designed and manufactured clamping device, which optimally fixes the control arm.
The voltage output of the HBK analogue amplifiers is measured with a multimeter and then compared with the results of the tensile testing machine.
Since only one of the two struts is used for the measurement at a time, the second strain gauge is used for thermal compensation with a quarter-bridge circuit. For this purpose, the settings of the values for the strain gauges, which can be found on the enclosed data sheets, are entered into the measuring amplifier and adjusted with an integrated rotary potentiometer.