In many machining industries today, the build-up of internal residual stresses within acrylic structures often result in engineering failures. These failures can be attributed to poor heat treatments and other poor machining processes. Norgren has tasked the students in UConn's Senior Design to study this issue of residual stress in the company's PMMA acrylic material blocks. In this study, the team should develop a new annealing process and observe the development of stress through a birefringence color system.

Our team collaborated with Materials Science & Engineering 3 on this project.