The laboratory tests structural components and sub-assemblies at or near full scale: beams, connections, masonry elements, track components and specimens recovered from service.
Its most consequential work is on assets already in the ground. When an asset owner must decide whether a nineteenth-century structure has another twenty years in it, a load test on genuinely representative material settles arguments that no amount of modelling can. The specimens are often ugly, irregular and irreplaceable, and the laboratory is used to treating them accordingly.
Fatigue programmes are the other speciality. These are long — weeks or months of cycling — and the laboratory is set up to run them with remote monitoring rather than a person watching a dial, which makes them affordable.
Staff are accustomed to asset owners' specifications and to writing reports that will be read by an engineer making a spending decision rather than a reviewer assessing novelty.
Specification
- Strong floor with reaction frame configurations
- Servo-hydraulic actuators to several hundred kilonewtons
- Static, cyclic and fatigue loading regimes
- Digital image correlation and full-field strain measurement
- Environmental conditioning for freeze–thaw and wetting cycles
- Long-duration remote monitoring of running tests
What it is the right answer to
Jobs this facility genuinely suits.
- Load testing of components recovered from service
- Fatigue assessment supporting remaining-life decisions
- Connection and joint capacity testing against a named standard
- Durability testing of alternative low-carbon materials
- Validation of a numerical model before it is used to justify deferral
What to bring
Turning up without these costs facility hours rather than bench hours.
- Specimens with provenance — location, age, loading history, condition on removal
- The standard or specification the result must be assessed against
- The decision the test is meant to inform, and who will make it
- Realistic expectations of specimen-to-specimen scatter
What you leave with
- Load, displacement and strain data through to the agreed limit or failure
- Full-field strain measurement records
- Assessment against the specified standard, with scatter reported honestly
- A report written for an asset owner's engineering decision
Limitations
Worth knowing before you write the proposal.
- Specimen size is bounded by the frame and the floor, not by ambition
- Recovered specimens are variable, and small samples support only weak conclusions
- Fatigue programmes take the time they take and cannot be usefully accelerated