Low cost flexure spring testing

Abstract

There are many references in the literature to fatigue testing of flexures for cryocoolers, but there is little information about the hardware required for this testing. This paper gives an overview of the requirements for flexure fatigue testing and discusses basic FE analysis of the flexures. Two different experimental methods are then described, one using commercial equipment, the other based on a simple custom-built linear oscillator. Both methods can be used for relatively high frequency testing which enables the 10 million cycles necessary to demonstrate the fatigue limit to be reached within a few days.