Development and Simulation of a Tensile Test Apparatus Down to Liquid Hydrogen Temperature Region

To meet the requirement of material mechanical properties testing in the field of liquid hydrogen engineering, with two G-M refrigerators as cooling source and gas helium as cooling medium, a tensile test apparatus at cryogenic tempe-rature was designed and developed. It can be applied in the temperature range of 14 K to 300 K and takes only 7 hours to reach the lowest temperature of 14 K by pre-cooling with liquid nitrogen. The temperature distribution of the specimen in the test chamber was simulated. The results showed the temperature gradient of the specimen mainly existed in the longitudinal direction, while there was no temperature difference in the transverse direction. The tensile properties of SS316L and SS304 were measured and compared with literature data. The repeatability of the present data was found to be higher than 97.8%. The maximum relative deviation between the measuring data of yield strength and tensile strength and the literature data was only 6.3%, showing that the test results of the tensile test device have high credibility and accuracy.