Not long ago, a manufacturer of needles for medical syringes was in the middle of another shift of quality assurance testing. The test involved three individuals side-by-side, with each grabbing the needles off the line and physically inserting them into a drill “chuck,” piercing a rubber slab to simulate the piercing of human skin.

Younger readers may be surprised to hear that the word plastic was once synonymous with cheap. Maybe that’s why Dustin Hoffman’s character was famously given the career advice to get into plastics in the movie “The Graduate.”

Fatigue testing varies greatly from application to application. Below are some of the top six examples to showcase how fatigue testing has become invaluable in a range of industries.

They’re as common as dandelions in the spring, and as universal as a Swiss army knife. Sometimes they gather dust, condemned to a dark corner, other times they’re polished to a mirror finish from intensive everyday use. We’re talking, of course, about universal testing machines (UTMs).

The purpose of tensile or mechanical testing is to measure the effect of force on a particular material or component, or on the adhesive or fastener that bonds two materials together.

Composite materials are being used in an ever-increasing variety of products and applications, as more and more industries realize the benefits that these materials offer.