Transportation

The Transportation Market is very broad including automotive, truck, trailers, rail and marine. The continuing need for fuel efficiency and emissions reductions in the automotive market has propelled automotive OEMs to seek alternatives to traditional carbon and interstitial free steels. Some of the next generation materials include high strength steels, stainless steels, as well as light alloys like aluminum and magnesium for body structures. There have also been recent inroads from carbon and glass fiber composites into the body structures market. Equally there have been efforts to introduce light alloys like aluminum and magnesium alloys for engine and transmission components in addition to technologies such as turbochargers in the engine area to increase power to weight ratio to combat emission and improve fuel efficiency. Demand for zero emission vehicles has also propelled development of electric drive using battery energy storage all of which required the need for lightweighting body structures to gain range per charge. Similar demands in other markets including truck, trailer and marine have also introduced opportunities for new materials.

Touchstone Testing Lab has a long history of working closely with key transportation OEMs to perform a wide variety of standard and non-standard testing.  We have capability to run tests on samples as well as components under normal and extreme environments. We are fully certified by A2LA for ISO 17025. Touchstone Testing Lab offers both lot release testing through dedicated test labs close to customers as well as material R&D, product qualification, prototyping and failure analysis services from our central laboratory.

Touchstone Testing Lab has capability and experience to run tests on following materials:

• 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, Surface Characterization, Failure Analysis, Machining and Fabrication