Energy

Energy markets include traditional fossil fuel and green energy market segments. Increasing climate change concerns has lead several government and intergovernmental bodies and traditional energy providers to turn their attention to alternative resources like natural gas, nuclear, wind, solar and other less traditional sources such as small hydro and tidal resources. Exploiting these alternative energy sources requires new material and manufacturing technologies. For example, to exploit natural gas as less polluting resource, alternative to traditional steel-based steam turbine materials like nickel and cobalt base alloys are required to facilitate operations at very high temperatures in excess of 2000F. Equally to exploit wind resources, new materials that can survive sand, water and wind erosion are required that can operate in desert as well as arctic environments. While some of these materials exist, the need to reduce operational costs require development of new materials and/or modifications of existing materials. Thus, design and performance data are needed to qualify these materials.

Touchstone Testing Lab has have a long history of working closely with key energy products OEMs such as gas turbine engine manufacturers, wind turbine engine manufacturers and solar panel manufacturers to perform a wide variety of standard and non-standard testing. We have capability to run various tests on samples to develop design and performance data. We also have limited capability to test components under extreme environment. We are fully certified by A2LA for ISO 17025.

At Touchstone Testing Lab, we work closely with customers in various program phases including Material R&D, Product Qualification, Prototyping, and Failure Analysis. We also offer lot related testing through a dedicated service laboratory close to our customers.

We have experience and capability to run tests on materials like:

• Metallic materials such as steels (carbon and alloy), aluminum, titanium, and other high temperature turbine materials including nickel, chromium, niobium, molybdenum and tungsten-based alloys.
• Nonmetallic materials including ceramics, intermetallic alloys, laminates and composites based on inorganic fiber like carbon and glass fibers, as well as organic fibers such as Kevlar, nylon and PLA.
• Polymer fibers including nylon, polyesters, as well as inorganic fibers like carbon, glass and other oxide and carbides.
• Coatings on metallic and nonmetallic substrates including surface characterization.

We offer the following services:

Mechanical Testing, Corrosion Evaluation, Material Characterization, Failure Analysis, Machining and Fabrication