Instrument and laboratory used in the Friability of Meteorites bundle
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Date: 2025-11-06
The information was extracted from the sources cited below.


PTF 100 Friability Tester
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The PTF-100 Friability Tester is a precision mechanical tumbler designed to quantify the abrasion and fragmentation resistance of particulate or granular materials under controlled impact conditions. The instrument consists of a transparent rotating drum with an internal baffle that lifts and drops the sample continuously during rotation, generating reproducible normal and shear stresses that simulate natural collisional disaggregation. For each test, a known mass of sample fragments is tumbled at a fixed rotation speed (25 ± 1 rpm) for prescribed revolution counts ranging from 10² to 10⁵. The cumulative mass loss and particle-size redistribution are measured after each tumbling stage to compute friability. The system conforms to the U.S. Pharmacopeia (USP <1216>) standard for friability measurement but has been adapted for geological materials by using stainless-steel drums and extended revolution counts to capture both early-stage cracking and late-stage attrition processes relevant to meteorite fragmentation.


EM3 Lab
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The Nano- and Micro-Mechanical Testing Lab, managed by Professor Christian Hoover, is equipped with advanced instrumentation for probing the mechanical behavior of materials across scales. The lab houses both micro- and nano-indenter systems, enabling precise indentation measurements on materials such as meteorites, glass, cement paste, and a wide range of other natural and synthetic substances. These tools allow quantitative determination of hardness, modulus, and deformation behavior by analyzing a material’s response to a controlled force applied through an indenter of known geometry. In addition to indentation testing, the lab is also equipped with a PTF-100 Friability Tester, which simulates low-energy mechanical impacts and abrasion through controlled tumbling. This instrument enables the study of material disaggregation and durability under repeated mechanical stress, bridging small-scale mechanical measurements with bulk friability and fragmentation behavior relevant to both planetary materials and engineering applications.


Sources:
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EM3 Lab and PTF 100 Friability Tester: Christian Hoover