Structures Laboratory

The Structures Laboratory, in the School of Civil Engineering and Surveying, is where students and researchers investigate the strengths and weaknesses of building materials and how they're put together. It’s fitted with bespoke structural testing apparatus including a thermo-mechanical impact testing rig and a dynamic testing rig.

The lab's used by students on courses including BEng (Hons) / MEng Civil Engineering and BSc (Hons) Construction Management, and is a location where we undertake our construction consultancy work. It’s also used for postgraduate research projects.

As part of our research into structures and materials, the lab houses structural concept demonstrators, along with specific testing apparatus for research work being carried out in the fields of Thermal Loading and Blast, Structural Health Monitoring, and Structural/Earthquake Dynamics.

Equipment

Zwick Z250 Universal tester which is used to test the majority of our materials. This equipment can undertake compressive, tensile and flexural testing
Hounsfield 50kN Universal tester
Losenhausen 1000kN Universal tester which has been updated to run using modern systems and Zwick Software. This is solely used for compressive or flexural testing where the requirements exceed that of the Z250
80kg payload Seismic Shaking Table
30m² Reinforced Concrete Reaction Floor capable of large scale testing

The space also contains a number of teaching aids that help students learn about key elements in structural design.

Structures lab

Study how different materials behave under different stress levels in our Structures Lab.

Dr Nikos Nanos

Welcome to the structures lab. What we are going to do today is run a test that will allow us to look at the behaviour of a very important material. So let's get started with that.

Right now, we are using two grips and we are pulling apart steel bar reinforcement. We are seeing the strain in terms of displacement for a given force. The important thing for us is to understand how materials behave under stress.

So we can see the material starting in its elastic behaviour, this is indicated by the linear part of this graph where we are seeing that as we apply load, we have an equal and constant increase in strength.

There comes a point where we have introduced so much force into the material that it started developing internal cracks. This is called the yield point, and this is indicated by this plateauing of the line.

The material, despite the fact that it cannot take any more load, does get longer and longer without failing in a brittle manner, is what works miraculously well when it is combined with material like concrete. The way these two materials work together when you have a reinforced concrete beam, for example, would be to start seeing the cracks. It will give ample warning because of steel's capacity to maintain the load bearing capacity of steel while it elongates.

Which means that instead of a sudden failure, it would give a progressive failure that would be easier to see and easier to avoid.

Where to find us