Stanford Engineering
Structures and Composites Laboratory

Resources Overview

SACL offers a multitude of resources for conducting research and manufacturing. These resources are comprehensively listed below.

MTS Adverse Environment Chamber

A modular environment chamber allows for thermal and environment variations during structural tests.

MTS Machines

SACL is equipped with two MTS machines and a variety of fixturing systems to allow for important material testing procedures (e.g. tensile, compressive, bending, and shear tests).

Heat Press

Two heat presses, capable of temperatures up to 600F and pressure up to 20 tons, allows SACL to perform critical steps in the manufacturing of our novel MESC composites.

FEM Workstation

With 16 cores, 128 GB of RAM, and a 2 TB NVMe PCIe SSD, the SACL workstation is equipped to handle any kind of computational analyses.

Composite Fabric Rack

SACL's composite fabric rack is supplied with all the necessary fabrics to manufacture composites; i.e., peel ply, bleeder, breather, vacuum bagging film, perforated release film, and solid film.

3D Printer Station

The 3D printer station includes a Form2 SLA printer with corresponding wash station, kit, and UV curing oven.  SACL policy is to use Draft resin for non-functional prototyping, and Tough resin for rapid functional prototyping.

Vacuum Ovens

Numerous vacuum ovens allow for dry, clean storage of our battery materials, eliminating unnecessary failure modes.

Large Capacity Oven

The 6’ x 3’ x 2’ oven allows us to cure and bond our own out of autoclave composites.

Microscope

The Nikon Microscope ECLIPSE LV100 comes with a 3x2 stage and a series of objective lenses for observing micro-structures and micro-cracks.

Semi-Auto Stacking Machine

To better manufacture our own battery stacks, SACL is equipped with a custom stacking machine with lab designed fixtures that simplifies the stacking process.

Glovebox

An inert glovebox, supplied with nitrogen, is used by SACL to fill our own battery stacks with electrolyte.

Screen Printer

The C.W. Price MC810 screen printer can be used to fabricate metallic electrodes and piezoceramic transducers. Screen printing enables mass fabrication over a wide range of sizes, from 4 μm to 100 μm thick and as small as 75 μm in width, enabling devices with dimensions on the order of individual fibers in composites or adhesive layers in laminate structures.

Battery Cell Cycler

Currently, SACL has four battery cyclers with different capabilities and benefits. For example, one has 4 available channels with a voltage range of -20V to 20V and a current range of -30A to 30A, with a resolution of 0.1mA. Another cycler has the most channels — up to 24 — and can measure voltage up to 5V and current up to 6A.

Delaminator Adhesion Test System

This delaminator is a high precision test system with full computer control and data analysis used for thin-film adhesive and cohesive fracture energy testing.

Cell Tab Welder

It is used to weld battery cell tabs on the electrode.

High Accuracy Ovens

Two high accuracy, programmable ovens allow for a controlled thermal environment during cycling tests of lithium batteries.