Facilities, Labs and Equipment

• Woodring Laboratory
• Fedric O. Hess Laboratory
• Intelligent Infrastructure Alliance
• Environmental Engineering Laboratory
• Computer Aided Design Lab
• Building Systems Lab
• Sustainable Water Resource Engineering Lab

 

 

Woodring Laboratory
The Woodring laboratory hosts a wide variety of geotechnical, geosynthetics, and materials engineering testing equipment. The geotechnical engineering testing equipment includes an automated cyclic triaxial testing device, a Geotac triaxial testing device, a ring shear apparatus and a large-scale consolidometer (12” by 12” sample size). Other equipment includes a Fisher pH and conductivity meter as well as a Brookfield rotating viscometer.

Fully automated cyclic triaxial shear testing device

The cyclic automated test unit completely automates triaxial testing of soils. The system incorporates all the features of the stress path system with a hydraulic servo control actuator for cyclic loading with up-date rates of 500 times a second. The LoadTrac II Cyclic consists of a triaxial cell to retain the sample, a load frame with computer controlled platen for static loading, two computer controlled flow pumps to con-trol chamber pressure and back pressure, a hydraulic servo control actuator for cyclic loading with update rates of 500 times per second, a micro-prosessor for accurately controlling cyclic loading, a PC with a Pentium processor to control the test and logging test data, and testing and data reduction software. The unit is a complete, self-contained system with all equipment necessary.

The LoadTrac II Cyclic is menu driven. The Windows-based software allows users to define the conditions for running the test, logging test data and reporting results. Users can specify the values for controlling the saturation, consolidation and cyclic loading of a test. During testing, current data and system status information is displayed. Collected data are written to a file on the system's hard drive. The reporting software performs all required calculations and permits users a variety of options in graphing and generating test data.

The geosynthetics testing equipment in the Woodring lab includes pressure cells for incubation and a new differential scanning calorimetry device including the standard-OIT. Materials testing equipment that is available through the materials and chemical engineering departments includes a scanning electron mi-croscope, liquid chromatography, and Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy.

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Fedric O. Hess Laboratory
The Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering Department at Drexel University houses the Structural Testing Laboratory located in the Hess building. This new testing facility was constructed in 1997 with partial funding from the National Science Foundation. A reaction floor (20 ft. wide by 50 ft. long) and an L-shaped reaction wall (25 ft. high) can accommodate biaxial testing of structural frames and wall subsystems. The reaction wall can resist a maximum point load of 100 kips at the highest anchor point. A two channel MTS control system and a 70 GPM pump are housed in the laboratory. Three MTS double acting servohydraulic actua-tors are available with force capacities of 320 kip, 110 kip and 55 kip and strokes of +/-6 i

Reaction Floor and Walls in Hess Lab

The Hess laboratory also hosts large-scale geotechnical experimental facilities, including a shaking table, multiaxial tension test device, and a pilot-scale facility for large geotechnical engineering experiments. The shaking table is a single degree of freedom, hydraulic device that can reach accelerations in excess of 3g. The payload capacity is about 2500 lbs. It has a displacement capacity of 6 inches, and full capacity to 50 Hz. The mulitaxial test machine is an experimental device developed at Drexel for assessing geosynthetic behavior under confined or unconfined conditions in uniaxial, biaxial, or axisymetric tension. The device is capable of performing both monotonic and cyclic tests over a range of strain rates (creep to near-blast rates) and under loading conditions that closely replicate those experienced over a variety of in-service conditions. The pilot-scale test facility is an 8’ by 12’ by 4’ deep steel box for modeling low-head delivery of stabilizing materials to liquefiable sands.

Multiaxial Test Machine in Hess Lab

The Hess laboratory is also equipped with a 32 channel HBM MGCplus data acquisition system. This system has a 24 bit A/D for each channel to enable synchronous data acquisition and is capable of sampling each channel up to 2.4 KHz. An array of sensors including LVDTs, wire potentiometers, linear and rotational accelerometers, and load cells are also available.
Also located in the Hess Lab is an hydraulics research facilities which includes a wave tank that is 100' long with a cross-section of 3' wide and 2 1/2 feet deep. The tank's sides and bottom are tempered glass in order to permit the observation and photographic recording of wave and beach processes. The tank is equipped with an HR Wallingford programmable, bulkhead-type, hydraulic wave maker capable of producing solitary waves, sinusoidal waves and various wave spectra including Bretschneider and JONSWAP spectra. The wave generator will also accept an external signal so that any desired bulkhead motion can be produced. For example, an external signal has been used to generate cnoidal waves in the tank. The wave generator has an active wave absorption system so that tests can be run continuously with minimal re-reflection of waves from the bulkhead.

Wave Tank looking down Stream Prior to Wave Generator Installation

The laboratory is served by a 5 ton overhead crane and large access doors for material delivery and removal.

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Drexel University’s Intelligent Infrastructure Alliance

Drexel University's Intelligent Infrastructure Alliance is a multi-cultural and multi-disciplinary consortium of infrastructure systems stakeholders. The Alliance focuses on systems along the Mid-Atlantic such as the dense highways, railroads, mass transit, bridges, tunnels, airports, ports, river navigation, dams, water systems, power plants, power transmission, buildings, and historic monuments that have aged and deteriorated.

The goals of this Alliance is to foster a deeper understanding of infrastructures as complex multi-domain systems comprised of human, natural and engineered sub-systems and elements.  The Alliance then analyzes under which conditions these elements become interdependent, based on their intersections and interactions.  It is recognized that various elements of these systems, such as traffic on a regional highway artery, or power consumption, are dynamic and non-stationary with deterministic and random behaviors.

The Alliance includes federal, state and bi-state highway and toll-bridge agencies, county and city engineers, mass-transit agencies, water-and-power utilities as well as a large number of industries that serve the needs of these owners. The academic research strategy is the transformation of selected and representative infrastructure sub-systems and elements into living field laboratories for research and education. The research focus is therefore on how to observe, measure and model multi-scale and multi-domain systems by taking advantage of real-life; how to leverage concepts and paradigms such as performance-based engineering, asset management, systems-identification and health and performance monitoring. The Alliance also performs educational research on how to reform civil engineering education and curricula by leveraging living field laboratories to train a new generation of engineers.

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Environmental Engineering Laboratory
The environmental engineering laboratories at Drexel University are located in Nesbitt Hall. These facilities contain a full complement of instrumentation inlcuding the following:

• Leica research microscope with phase contrast and epiflourescence capability (and video camera)
• Water baths, incubators, refrigerators and standard and ultracold freezers
• Temperature controlled circular with immersion stirrers suitable for inactivation studies at volumes up to 2 L per reactor
• Clinical centrifuge
• Amperometric titrator
• Spectrophotometer

Professor Haas has also established a dedicated computational facility, located in the Alumni Engineering laboratory, containing multiple Macintosh G4 machines, and several Dell workstations, which is used to maintain and collect data to perform statistical analyses. The Dell machines have also been used to run the CFX and CFDACE codes, as well as routine numerical and statistical analysis software.

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Computer Aided Design Lab
Located in CAT 167 the Compyter Aided Design (CAD) Lab consists of 25 PCs, a laser jet printer, a scanner, a study table and 2 work spaces for laptop users. More than 50 different types of software are available on each machine as well as permanent connections to the university network and the World Wide Web. Please visit the CAD Lab website for more information

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Building Systems Lab
The Building systems lab performs research in building mechanical and electrical systems. The facility, located in the Woodring Labs, includes a Solar Lab for research on various aspects of solar renewable energy applications are performed. The York International HVAC Undergraduate Teaching Laboratory has been designed, constructed and equipped with the primary purpose of providing our undergraduate students with the practical and hands-on skills necessary to complement their theoretical classroom instruction. At present, the laboratory is equipped with the following six trainers:

• Complete air-handler trainer
• Complete heat pump trainer
• Complete refrigeration trainer
• Parrallel and series pump trainer
• HVAC duct balancing under variable-speed fan operation trainer
• Demonstration reck of various pseumatic HVAC control devices

All the above trainers are fully instrumented allowing students to perform several lab experiments and to make measurements at different operating conditions of the equipment. It was deliberately decided that students be made to take the measurements manually, allowing the students to acquire the necessary familiarity with different types of sensors and measurement devices.
For more information visit the Building Systems Laboratory Website

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Sustainable Water Resource Engineering Lab
The Sustainable Water Resource Engineering Laboratory at Drexel University is a collaborative environment in which students, faculty, researchers, and community partners innovate the next generation of socially, ecologically, and economically sustainable water infrastructure systems. Our applied research involves field work in urban and urbanizing watersheds and the development of new cross-disciplinary modeling and analysis tools. The participation of multiple stakeholders in problem conceptualization helps to clarify the multidisciplinary challenge that sustainability poses to engineers. It also sets the stage for the development of truly integrated engineering solutions. Our projects are funded by local, state, and federal government agencies, as well as non-profit foundations. Please visit the SWRE Website for more information

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