Specimen for a novel concept of the biaxial tension test

In times of growing claims for light weight solutions in the transportation industry new materials are required. Especially, high strength steels and light weight materials, e.g. aluminium and magnesium, offer great potentials. Since the behaviour of new materials cannot be predicted, basic investigations have to be done. This paper introduces a kind of specimen which is used for a novel experimental set-up to characterise sheet metals also at elevated temperatures as it is needed for magnesium sheets. Analytical and numerical investigations are done to enhance the fundamental understanding of stress distribution during loading. Optimisation of specimen's geometry is based on FE-calculation and leads to special designed slitted sheets.