Automated Marx's Composite Oscillator Method

Marx's composite oscillator method has been successfully automated for measuring internal friction and Young's modulus. The apparatus automatically finds the mechanical resonant frequency of the composite oscillator and keeps the strain amplitude constant, so that internal friction and the modulus can easily be measured and directly recorded on an X-t recorder. This device enables us to observe continuously the time dependence of the pinning and unpinning processes of dislocation by point defects. The error in strain amplitude is suppressed to within ±0.1%, while the internal friction value changes by 2 orders of magnitude. The operation of this system has been analyzed by automatic control theory, and the theoretical results are in good agreement with the experiment results. The analysis and the application of this method are presented here together with some experimental results.