Structural Research And Testing Laboratory
Available services of the Structural Research and Testing Laboratory include both static and dynamic testing of materials, structural components and assemblies at the research laboratory or on site.
Structural Testing facilities and scope include:
- Multi-purpose structural testing facility for testing specimens and assemblies up to 4m high at:
- 10,000kN (1000 tonne) static compressive load;
- Simultaneous 1000kN lateral fluctuating load at 3 Hz;
- Simultaneous loading with dual actuators at 500kN tilting load, each at 3Hz synchronous or asynchronous loading.
Strong Floor 8m x 16m and associated Testing Rigs
- Loading frames up to 5000kN (500 tonnes). These frames are complemented by multi-configurable strong floor of 16m x 8m with numerous actuators ranging from 150kN to 2000kN.
- Impact testing of materials using Split Hopkinson Pressure Bar system for specimen sizes 16mm and 80mm.
- Morris Heckenburg Research Furnace for testing structural specimens at 2000kN compressive load at temperatures up to 800 degrees centigrade.
- Testing for dynamic characteristics of structures, concrete floors, buildings, assemblies, modal analysis for structures and assemblies.
The research and industry consultation projects are served with state of the art instrumentation and data acquisition systems backed by a CPU/GPU based High Performing Computer cluster with computational power of 2060 GigaFLOPS (One GigaFLOP is equivalent to one billion (109) floating-point operations per second).
Hongshan 1000 tonne multipurpose testing machine
Another feature of the SRT lab is the panel vacuum testing rig specifically designed to test walls under uniform pressure and in their natural vertical position. The walls are assembled horizontally at the working height level and are then pulled into the rig by an electric winch. A special loading regime is automatically applied in a fully controlled state by means of pressure sensors, displacement transducers and a highly accurate data logging device. The system allows running hundreds of tests with minimum operator time or effort. The uniform application of load by means of vacuum, vertical operation and horizontal assembly in addition to its enormous size being capable of testing walls up to 6.5 m tall makes this rig very unique.
The vacuum panel testing rig in use
Please direct any structural research and testing enquiries to:
