Pneumatic Grips
Pneumatic Grips for Universal Testing Machines
Overview
Pneumatic grips use air to actuate the grip jaws and provide a constant and repeatable lateral force on the sample specimen. There are many different types of pneumatic grips that are used for tensile testing including vise grips, wedge grips, and certain styles of rope grips. Pneumatic grip setups are ideal for production environments with high testing throughput requirements.
Using pneumatic tensile grips is easy and makes testing incredibly repeatable because the gripping force is the same for each test. Variance between technicians is eliminated. Pneumatic grips can also speed up the pace of testing in a lab because opening and closing the air-actuated fixture is quick. Robotic testing systems will commonly use pneumatic grips or hydraulic grips in order to secure the sample specimen.
Setting up your Pneumatic Grips is easy:
The most common pneumatic vise grip package includes 2 grips, 2 locking pins, 4 jaw inserts, a pair of switches (hand switches shown below), 20 feet of hose, 1 ultra quiet compressor, and all of the couplings and fittings required. Universal Grip sources premium pneumatic components from Festo and offers complete solutions for pneumatic grip setups.
Installing a pneumatic grip onto your Universal Testing Machine is very easy to do because we supply our customers with everything they need. Please watch the below videos for more information on how to get your tensile air grips up and running.
Switches
Pneumatic fixtures can have three types of switches which are used to open and close the pneumatic actuator. The first type of switch is installed at the base of the grip, this is the lowest cost option. Foot pedals are safest option because they can be placed on the floor, away from the tensile tester. The third and final option for pneumatic switches are hand levers. Below you can find pictures of each type of switch.
Pneumatic Hoses
The air hoses use an M5 connection. Teflon hoses are available for high temperature testing up to 280 degrees Celsius. The picture below shows the centric pneumatic grips which are installed with finger switches at the base. The video shows how to connect a pneumatic hose up to the air grips. UGC's product line includes over 100 different types of pneumatic designs to fit virtually any tensile strength testing application.
