Novel method and instrument for temperature-dependent tensile test of metallic materials without thermometers

A novel method for measuring temperature and conducting tensile tests of metallic wires at elevated temperatures is presented. Ohmic heating is used to elevate the sample temperature with a uniform distribution, which could vary from room temperature to its melting point. The temperatures of the wires in steady states are determined by using a heat transfer model without measuring directly by thermometers, which reduces the error introduced by contact temperature measurement or optical pyrometers. This technique for temperature measurement can be applied to measuring temperature-dependent electrical resistivity and conducting temperature-dependent tensile tests of metallic materials. A low-cost instrument was designed to conduct the tensile tests. In this work, temperature-dependent Young’s modulus, tensile strength at break, and the steady-state creep rate of 99.994%-pure Pb wires were further determined as applications of the tensile tests. The results show that the proposed method is valid and very useful for conducting temperature-dependent tensile tests of metallic materials.