Measurement of Young's Modulus using

Strain Gauges on a Cantilevered Beam

Author: Joshua Clark

Laboratory Partner: Kyle Deeter

1. ABSTRACT

This paper describes the experimental determination of Young's modulus using strain gauges on a

cantilevered beam. The experimental apparatus consisted of a 37.31 cm long cantilevered steel beam with

metallic strain gauges mounted to the top and bottom of the beam at the same distance from the fixed end.

These two strain gauges were used to in half-arm Wheatstone bridge circuit to measure the strain from

bending stress caused by hanging weights from the free end of the beam. At each loading of the beam,

bending stress was calculated at the location of the strain gauges. Multiple loadings were performed, and

the recorded data was used to create a stress vs. strain plot. A line was fit to the data using least-squares

regression. The slope of this line, known as Young's Modulus, was determined to be 197.36 ± 5 MPa, which

is consistent with the standard published value of 200 MPa.

11. INTRODUCTION

The mechanical design process refers to the application of mathematics, material science, and

engineering-mechanics to the design of mechanical components and systems (Shigley, Mischke et al. 2004).

Critical to proper mechanical design is accurate knowledge of material properties. One such important

property is the mechanical stiffness of the material.

According to Hooke's law, stress is proportional to strain over the elastic region of a material (Shigley,

Mischke et al. 2004). The ratio of stress to strain in this region is known as the modulus of elasticity, or

Young's modulus. In most cases, components are designed to stay within the elastic range of the material.
Thus, knowing Young's modulus for a material allows designer to predict how a component might elongate

or deflect when subjected to a given load or stress.

There are multiple ways to determine Young's modulus of a material. The most common method is

tensile testing, in which a material sample is loaded directly in tension. An alternative method is presented

here. Specifically, we describe the measurement of Young's modulus using metallic strain gauges mounted

to a cantilevered beam. By moment-loading a cantilevered beam with multiple weights, the calculated stress

may be compared to the measured strain at the location of the gauges, producing corresponding to the stress

strain ratio known as Young's modulus.

Metallic strain gauges measure are passive electrical resistive components whose resistance increases

when subjected to a load, a phenomenon first explored by Lord Kelvin in 1856 (Thomson 1856). Although

the design of strain gauges amplifies can amplify the effect, the sensitivity of resistance strain gauges

remains low and difficult to directly measure. To solve this problem, a Wheatstone bridge circuit, which is

highly sensitive to resistance changes, is typically included as part of the strain measurement system

(Figliola and Beasley 2015).

This paper describes the measurement of Young's modulus using metallic strain gauges mounted to a

cantilevered beam and is organized as follows. The Methods section describes the theory of strain-gauge

sensors and their calibration, including the utilization of an operational amplifier and Wheatstone bridge

circuit. This is followed by a description of the strain-gauge sensor including the experiment apparatus and

data acquisition equipment. This is then followed by a thorough description of the experimental procedure.

Next, the Results section reflects the experimental data as well as the uncertainty calculations. The final

section, Discussion and Conclusions, evaluates the accuracy of the strain gauge and reflects the areas within

the experiment where the highest uncertainty exists.

111. METHODS

THE CANTILEVERED BEAM

The cantilevered beam is made of steel and consists of one end being fixed and the other end free

where weights can be attached to simulate a bending load. The beam has a width of 0.25”, measured

with a caliper; and a thickness of 1.5”, measured with a micrometer. Strain gauges are attached 14.69”

from the free end of the beam, one placed on top and one placed on bottom of the beam.

Figure 1. Cantilevered beam used for experimentally determining Young's Modulus. The cantilevered beam is fixed at one end
and free at the other. The free end of the beam is where the weights are hung from to create a bending load. To the left of the
beam is the op-amp circuit that is used to amplify the signal from each strain gauge.
 CALCULATED STRESS

Stress, in a cantilevered beam as shown above can be calculated according to (Shigley, Mischke,

and Budynas 2004)

𝑀𝑦
𝜎= (1)
𝐼

where 𝑀 is the moment caused by the weights at the end of the beam, 𝑦 is the distance from the

centroid to the outermost fiber, and 𝐼 is the second moment of area of the beam.

STRAIN MEASUREMENT

Strain in the cantilevered beam is measured with the utilization of a half-arm bridge circuit. This can

be calculated according to (Figliola and Beasley 2015)

𝛿𝑣0
𝜀=2 (2)
𝐺(𝑣𝑖 )(𝐺𝐹)

where 𝜀 is the strain, 𝛿𝑣0 is the change in output voltage from loaded to unloaded condition, 𝑣𝑖 is the

input voltage, 𝐺 is the instrumentation amplifier gain, and 𝐺𝐹 is the gauge factor. Refer to Table 1 for

values used in equation 2.

The instrumentation amplifier used in this experiment is the AD622. With the use of a high-

precision 102Ω resistor, the amplifier gain is set to 500. For data acquisition, an NI USB-6001 was used in

combination with a Simulink program.

 EXPERIMENTAL PROTOCOL

Experimental data was acquired at 8 different weights ranging from 0.4 kg (small stress) to 1.8 kg

(larger stress) using 0.2 kg intervals. Four data points were collected for each weight: output voltage when

beam is unloaded, output voltage when beam is loaded, and output voltage when beam is unloaded again.

The output voltage when the beam is loaded produces two data points which are compared to the output

voltage when the beam is originally unloaded and the output voltage when the beam is then unloaded again.

This is necessary in order to get an accurate 𝛿𝑣0 in equation 2 for calculating strain and to account for the

beam’s inability to deflect downward under a bending moment and return to its precise original state.

REGRESSION

Equation 1 and 2 are used to calculate the stress and strain of the cantilevered beam for each data

point. The calculated stress is then plotted against the calculated strain from each data point that is

collected. The following general equation

𝑦 = 𝑎1 ∗ 𝑥 + 𝑎0 (3)

is utilized to apply a linear fit to the generated stress vs. strain plot. Since young’s modulus is equal to

stress divided by strain, the slope of the linear regression line, 𝑎1 shown in equation 3, represents the

calculated young’s modulus from the experiment. The bias, which should be close to zero, is

represented in equation 3 as 𝑎0 .

UNCERTAINTY ANALYSIS

Once all the data is collected, the uncertainty of the experiment must be calculated to understand the

overall accuracy of the experiment. The following equation

𝑢𝑒 =

2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2
√( 𝑑𝐸 𝑢𝑚 ) + (𝑑𝐸 𝑢𝑔 ) + (𝑑𝐸 𝑢𝐿 ) + ( 𝑑𝐸 𝑢𝑤 ) + (𝑑𝐸 𝑢𝑡 ) + ( 𝑑𝐸 𝑢𝐺𝐹 ) + (𝑑𝐸 𝑢𝐺 ) + ( 𝑑𝐸 𝑢𝑉𝑖 ) + ( 𝑑𝐸 𝑢𝑉𝑜 ) (4)
𝑑𝑚 𝑑𝑔 𝑑𝐿 𝑑𝑤 𝑑𝑡 𝑑𝐺𝐹 𝑑𝐺 𝑑𝑉𝑖 𝑑𝑉𝑜

is derived to calculate the error propagation of the independent measurements used for the calibration

data. Refer to Table 1 for the calculated uncertainty of each individual measurement made in the

experiment. The other source of error in the experiment is the standard error of the fit of the line. This

can be calculated using the following equation

1
𝑢𝑠1 = 𝑠𝑦𝑥 √( ) (5)
∑𝑁 2
𝑖=1(𝑥1 − 𝑥̅ ) )

where 𝑠𝑦𝑥 is the standard error of the fit, 𝑥1 is the independent value of each data point, and 𝑥̅ is the

mean value of all independent variables. The uncertainty for each individual measurement is important

when calculating the overall uncertainty for the experiment. To calculate the total uncertainty, the

following equation is used

𝑢 𝑇 = √(𝑢𝐸 )2 + (𝑢𝑠1 )^2 (6)

where 𝑢𝐸 is found using equation 4 and 𝑢𝑠1 is found using equation 5.

IV. RESULTS

Once the regression analysis has been applied, the following linear equation

𝑦 = 0.19736𝑥 + 0.29564 (7)

is generated with values determined by the regression. The slope of the linear regression equation

represents the calculated young’s modulus based on the data points that were collected.

Figure 2. The Stress vs. Strain plot generated from the experimental data collected, represented by the blue dots in the plot
above. The slope of the linear regression line (red solid line) represents the calculated young's modulus of the material of the
beam.

When calculating uncertainty of the experiment, each form of measurement within the

experiment presents its own uncertainty. As shown below in Table 1, the biggest areas of uncertainty

are the mass of the weights used to create the bending moment and the gauge factor. It is important to

calculate the uncertainty for each form of measurement in the experiment because as shown in table 1,

the amount of uncertainty will add up. As shown in figure 2, the dashed lines represent the possible

ranges for uncertainty in this specific experiment. This error propagation approach is conservative
 because it includes the uncertainty of each measurable variable in the experiment. This allows us to

expect a higher amount of uncertainty in our results although our data represents a lower level of

uncertainty as shown in figure 2.

𝑚
m (kg) g (𝑠 2 ) L (m) w (m) t (m) GF G 𝑉𝑖 𝛿𝑣0

Variable value or 1.146 kg 9.8051 0.3731 0.0381 0.00635 2.012 500 10 0.20401
mean value 8

Variable 0.01 1.40E-05 1.27E-06 0.00012 1.27E-05 0.01 0.002 0.0005 V 0.0005 V
Uncertainty 7

Uncertainty 1.81E+0 290380 692340 -6.8E+08 -8.1E+08 1.02E+0 813500 1016900 -2.6E+08
propagated to 9 9 0
Young’s Modulus, E
(GPa)

Table 1: Experimental uncertainty table. Tabel shows mean values of independent variables, variable uncertainties, and
uncertainty propagated to Young's Modulus.
v. DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONS

Our results from this conducted experiment are relatively close to the published values of

steel. We calculated a young’s modulus of 197.36 GPa whereas the published value of young’s

modulus for steel is 200 GPa. Also, the bias in our calculated regression analysis is close to zero

which represents that our method of data acquisition was relatively accurate. The uncertainty we

calculated was larger than expected. However, using an experimental apparatus with a higher

number of measurable variables warrants a higher uncertainty. The variables that caused the

largest uncertainties in Young’s modulus were the mass and the gauge factor. This could be

corrected with high precision weights or with higher-precision strain gauges. In this case

however, a lower cost strain gauge with a higher uncertainty was acceptable for this experiment.

This approach to determining Young’s modulus compared to using a tensile test is easier to

replicate and record accurate data. Conducting a tensile test otherwise would require a greater

amount of force on each end of the beam to achieve similar 𝛿𝑣0 data points. A tensile test would

also output a smaller data spread as it would be more difficult to elongate the beam, thus

decreasing the overall accuracy of the experiment. Therefore, determining Young’s modulus

using a bending test with this style of beam produces accurate results and is easily replicated.

VI. REFERENCES

Figliola, R. S. and D. Beasley (2015). Theory and design for mechanical measurements, John Wiley &

Sons.

Shigley, J. E. , C. R. Mischke and R. G. Budynas (2004). Mechanical engineering design, McGraw-Hill.

Thomson, W. L. K. (1856). "On the electrodynamic qualities of metals." Philosophical transactions of the

Royal Society (London) 146: 649-751