I'm a new master's student in mechanical engineering, and I'm researching crop biomechanics. We need to do some tensile tests on samples of corn stalk sheath, which involves securely and evenly gripping a sample at two ends in a machine and pulling slowly until the sample experiences mechanical failure.
My advisor thought we might simply be able to use an adhesive such as super glue to fix the sheath samples to the tensile test machine, but he found that super glue doesn't adhere well to the sheath because of a waxy layer on the surface.
As someone who doesn't have a botany or biology background, I'm wondering if there are adhesives out there already that would serve such a purpose? Or perhaps another way of fixing the sheath to the machine? Normally tensile machines are used to grip metal or polymer samples, and have simple claw-like grips at either end.
