A virtual laboratory for material testing

This paper describes and motivates the design and development of a framework for a virtual laboratory for material testing called Virlab. A virtual laboratory is an open and flexible environment that is used to simulate material tests, such as uniaxial, biaxial and multiaxial extension and compression tests, both with load and displacement control options. The virtual laboratory can simulate the material behaviour for elastic or viscoelastic materials, or for new materials later added by a designer. The software framework simplifies adding a new material model because a designer can focus on specifying the tests that are important for them and then leave the system to handle the details of data manipulation and the user interface. Once the designer adds a new model, any user is free to experiment with the new material and to examine it from different viewpoints by plotting combinations of the resulting experimental data. Example virtual experiments are presented to illustrate how Virlab helps reduce ambiguity in models of material behaviour, helps students learn about continuum mechanics, and assists researchers in rapidly developing more expressive constitutive equations.