For my research I found the need to automatically visit a webpage to run a setup and a teardown script. Turns out that it is fairly easy to do. The script is included below.

#cd to Internet Explorer
cd "C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer"
#point ie to the teardown script
./iexplore.exe 10.0.0.20/teardown.php
#sleep for one second - this is needed so IE has a chance to start before it is killed
sleep 1
#kill the internet explorer process
get-process iexplore | stop-process