Instron 3100/8500

Uniaxial

servomechanical actuation allows for high-precision creep, load-relaxation and low-frequency reciprocating uniaxial loading. The apparatus has, in the past, been outfitted with a high-temperature, controlled-atmosphere furnace and a gravity-fed mechanical extensometer and used for flexural attenuation experiments on silicate partial melts [Gribb and Cooper, 1995] and for load-relaxation studies of halite [Stone et al., 2004] and of olivine [Cooper et al., 2016] single crystals. The apparatus is currently outfitted with a custom designed/built cryostat capable of continuous operation at 100˚K; it is employed in experiments concerning the creep-affected, low-frequency attenuation in water ice and in ice-hydrate eutectics [McCarthy et al., 2011; Caswell et al., 2015; McCarthy & Cooper, 2016], as well as in ice fatigue/toughness experiments [Hammond et al., 2018]. With appropriately sized specimens, strain resolution is 10–7.

Loading; Unloading