Nick Jacobs leads the Material Performance Evaluation Group and has over 17 years of mechanical testing and mechanical design experience. The breadth of his testing experience covers many standard and unique test methods including tension, compression, constant amplitude and variable amplitude (spectrum) fatigue, bearing, shear, strain control fatigue, high cycle (1000 Hz) fatigue, creep, stress rupture, hydrogen embrittlement, fatigue crack growth rate, sliding and reciprocating wear testing, flexural testing, and specialized test methods for hard coating evaluation.
Nick has testing experience covering a range of environmental conditions and materials. Typical materials include corrosion resistant steels, polymeric matrix composites, chromium alternative coatings, cadmium alternative coatings, ceramic matrix composites, nickel-based superalloys, aluminum alloys, titanium alloys, metal matrix composites, and high strength steels.
Nick has designed a number of unique test fixtures, standard and nonstandard test specimens, and test instrumentation devices. For specialized test situations, he has developed unique test methodologies and nonstandard test methods. He has experience programming automated test machine control and data acquisition routines using LabView. One of his areas of concentration is improvement of current test methods through innovative instrumentation, advancement of data acquisition techniques, and improved measurement methods.
Nick has authored numerous technical and evaluation reports on a wide variety of research topics including hard chromium replacement coatings and processes, cadmium replacement technologies, evaluation of corrosion resistant high strength stainless steels, friction stir processing, and failure analysis support testing.
Nick’s current research interests include low induced stress machining, fatigue crack growth test methodology, development of high temperature extensometry, and improved instrumentation for adhesive bondline shear strain measurement.