In your home you have a circuit box and that box takes incoming electricity and distributes it through the homes wiring system. But in all reality, its true job is to hold the “circuit breakers” in one convenient location. So, when you plug in too many appliances, or there is a short in the system, the “fuse” (circuit breaker) blows and an emergency is averted.
Material Technologies, Inc. (OTCBB: MTTG) which we also know as “MATECH” is primarily engaged in the research and development of metal fatigue detection, measurement, and monitoring technologies. They have created a “fuse” which monitors metal fatigue, allowing precise stress evaluation of the fatigue damage present. Here’s how it works and why it’s interesting and more importantly, why it’s useful.
When metal parts are subject to repeated stress cycles, eventually those stresses “wear out” the metal and the structural integrity of the unit is put in peril. Eventually total failure of the structure can take place, with varying degrees of consequences, none of them being what we’d classify as good. Yet interestingly, even though metal has been used for hundreds of years, to make everything from radar domes, to towers, to nuclear facilities to crane booms to you name it, there hasn’t been a reliable method of measuring the fatigue levels in the metal. Well, MATECH has solved that with their “Fuse” technology.
A “Fatigue Fuse” is a set of notched metal strips, with varying stress concentration factors calibrated into them. These are placed on a high-stress area of a metal structure, and as the structure experiences stresses and strains, individual notches of the Fatigue Fuse crack and separate at precisely calibrated fractions of its design fatigue life, thereby indicating fatigue levels of the underlying structure. Each strip experiences structural strains until a crack initiates and severs the connection. The number of load cycles before separation is a measure of fatigue damage experienced by the structure since the Fatigue Fuse was installed.
Tests of the Fatigue Fuse for welded steel civil bridge members have been completed by the University of Rhode Island. Westland Helicopter, a British firm, has even successfully tested the Fatigue Fuse on helicopter hub housings; and the legs of the Fuses failed in sequence precisely as predicted. Fatigue Fuses are currently being used on portable aluminum bridges for the US Army, as they need to monitor stress levels to prevent any hazardous situations from developing.
In your home’s wiring, the fuse box is your first line of defense against an electrical disaster. When it’s overstressed, the fuse pops and you are alerted to the fact that something isn’t quite right, and possibly even seriously dangerous. With the Fatigue fuse, MATECH has enabled anyone with no special training or technical knowledge what so ever, to monitor the stress and fatigue levels in critical metal parts and report to their proper superiors any Fuse “pops”. Knowing when fatigue has progressed to the point where failure is probable is the first line of defense toward averting disaster.
Matech has two impressive technologies that can not only save time and money, they can also save lives. Metal failure in bridgework, cranes, towers, etc is a disaster, sometimes of epic proportions, as witnessed by the bridge collapse in Minneapolis last year. The company sits in the sweet spot when it comes to demand, considering that with just bridge work alone, there are some 20 billion dollars worth of repairs that are needed immediately, and an astounding 150,981 bridges alone that the Federal Highway Authority says are rated structurally deficient or functionally obsolete. One would think that careful monitoring of the other 480,000 would be desired, and so it has.
Whether the rotor of a helicopter, or the spool barrel of a crane, or the hull of a great ship, MATECH Fuse technology can help prevent troubles and even disasters. The need was there, the demand is there and now the solution is here. Just in November, the New York DOT selected MATECH to monitor another bridge that was known to have structural stress problems and needed repairs. MATECH was called in to assure that as the repairs were made and that no new stress cracks were formed or forming. Its technology like that, that can save lives and make investors smile. What could be better than that?
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