Fatigue Testing on Shoe Soles
Sportsmaster is an international manufacturer and retailer of sports apparel, footwear and equipment for a wide variety of brands. It is part of the TOP 10 sports and outdoor retail companies worldwide. Most of the stores are located in Denmark, Poland, Russia, Belarus, Armenia, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan. The Group is headquartered in Singapore and has branch offices in China, Bangladesh, and Vietnam.
Fatigue Testing in the Singapore Test Center
In order to be able to react fast to the changing needs of their customers, testing of new materials is a necessity and developing new products must happen fast and efficient. Sportsmaster collaborates with Research Centers and Institutes worldwide to ensure quality control, to conduct functional tests of products and to study properties and behavior of materials. One example is determining the best possible additives for the light-weight shoe soles.
The Innovation Centre in Singapore aims to pioneer breakthrough sports technology and is housed under the School of Material Science and Engineering at Nanyang Technological University with the support of Singapore’s Economic Development Board.
“Singapore is the first test center to conduct fatigue testing to copy a person’s walking and running pattern. In our test we simulate a distance coverage of 100 km which usually takes approximately 7 hours. Our focus is on the sole of the running shoe. Thanks to the consistent performance of the LTM we are able to run a comparison of different polymer material types and compare the test results effectively and reliably.” (Aleksandr Kashcheev, R&D manager at Sportmaster Singapore)
The LTM does not require servohydraulic components with additional media connections such as oil, pneumatics, or coolant. The clean application technology thus results in low operating and maintenance costs. Due to its wide speed range, the LTM is not only able to perform fatigue tests, but static tests as well. This enables the customer to use the testing machine for static tests on a variety of raw materials. The flexibility of our testXpert III testing software for static testing and testXpert R for dynamic testing is also very beneficial for this purpose.
In addition, the customer chose to equip the LTM5 with a temperature chamber, allowing them to run tests under various temperature conditions, for example to simulate winter conditions in the sub zero till -20 °C.
“We are currently also utilizing live testing with a real human connected to sensors while running on a treadmill. We hope in the future we will be able to run an entire test simulating the behavior of human legs in different directions using ZwickRoell machines.” (Aleksandr Kashcheev)
