Construction Materials Labs

The Cementitious Materials and Construction Materials Testing Laboratories have numerous cement and concrete testing equipment sets.  These labs have equipment to mix batches of various sizes in volume and can provide all standard tests of fresh concrete such as slump, flow, air content, and unit weight. Other equipment includes a 3-ton overhead crane.

Durability testing is an important aspect of these labs, and they contain a variety of equipment for this purpose. Tests of concrete permeability such as rapid chloride permeability, AC impedance testing, and AC impedance spectroscopy are routinely conducted. Also, the potential for alkali silica reactivity can be determined by numerous methods.

Researchers in these labs frequently use a state-of-the-art freeze-thaw chamber with computer-controlled and programmable temperature cycles.  This device is frequently used to conduct rapid freezing and thawing but can be configured to conduct a wide range of cold temperature investigations. Computer-based determination of the mass-adjusted dynamic modulus from resonant frequency analysis tracks deterioration.

Test equipment is also available for nondestructive evaluation of construction materials and structures with wave propagation methods, including fundamental frequency devices, pulse velocity, oscilloscopes, transducers, and various impact instruments.