Round-robin biaxial tensile testing of architectural coated fabrics

This paper describes the procedure followed for the preliminary determination of the precision of a typical commercial biaxial test usually required for the analysis and design of a membrane structure. It consists of a round robin exercise carried out by three of the more representative biaxial laboratories in Europe on samples of the PVC coated polyester fabric used in the realisation of the New Juventus Stadium in Turin. The comparison procedure consists of a round robin inter- laboratory test based on three different samples belonging to the same batch of material. The comparison analyses the ability of the testing apparatus to reproduce the prescribed load profile, the differences in the strain measured at the centre of the sample, and the precision of the values of stiffness obtained by the experimental data and used in the design process.