Load Testing Aluula and Dacron Kite and Wing Materials | Reece's Shred Lab

"And so I'm here at the Ocean Rodeo headquarters where Aluula is being tested, and I am going to be doing some load-testing on some Aluula that I have here, and I'm going to compare it to some standard Dacron that is normally used on the leading edge of kites.

Alright, so the Aluula weighed in at 78 GSM, and the Dimension Polyne Dacron weighed in at 157 GSM. And so when we go into this tear test, which is going to happen next, keep in mind that the Aluula is basically half the weight of the Dacron.

So, I've got some little square samples of material here that I cut out from these bigger sheets, and they are about 11cm by 9cm. So we're going to start with the Dacron. I'm going to melt a couple of holes through it, and then we're going to put it on the machine and see how much it can hold.

When I pull on it like this, the Dacron fails at 235 lbs of pressure. While the Aluula material can handle a load of 465 lbs before failing.

Now, we are going to try and do a tear propagation test. So I've put a slit in the material already to kind of simulate if the material was to get sliced by a rock or by a prickle bush or something sharp.

And now we're going to pull on it in the similar way that we did before and see what happens and how strong it is when it already has a slit inside of it.

The Dacron material failed at 88 lbs of pressure, whereas the Aluula material held firm all the way up to 187 lbs of pressure."

- Reece, from  "Reece's Shred Lab"