Cold room laboratories

Description of refrigerated material test laboratory:

Four rooms each with independent refrigeration systems. First room is for sample preparation, the second room is for testing, the third is an anteroom which maintains a constant temperature of 0°C, and the fourth is maintained at a nominal temperature for long-term ice storage. The fourth room is often used for ice tank ice quality and general laboratory work where temperature control is less critical.

Description of MTS materials test system:

A 1 MN load frame, maximum force of 160 kN with a maximum actuator speed of 130 mm/s.   A 100 kN load frame, maximum force of 25 kN with a maximum actuator speed of 1600 mm/s. is available upon request. 

Refrigeration:

HP-80 Freon gas based system, 1 evaporator for each room, temperature range (–5 to –32 +/- 0.5)ºC. Temperature range of anteroom  +20° to -10°C.

The temperature range of the storage room is  0ºC to –32ºC nominally kept at –18ºC.  A backup power generator protects the storage room.

Tests performed:

Uni-axial compressive and tensile strength tests. Stock platens include a variable length 0.05-1.1m triple-point beam and a temperature controlled compressive platen of Ø15.2cm. Tri-axial cell with a confining pressure of 25Mpa is available upon request. Various uni-axial material and or equipment tests are performed at ambient laboratory temperature.

Ice preparation equipment available:

Manual-3 axis Milling Machine (L 24”x w11 ¾”x h13 ½”) ,  Lathe (24”x Ø 6”),  10 x 14 cm sled microtome, 17” Band Saw, 8” jointer. Water Distillery rated @5 l/hr, 2 Nold deaerators at 8 l each. 2 Vacuum manifold systems rated at 15 and 1 micron. Two large, portable ice growth tanks at 700 l and 170 l with pressure relief. Ice crusher and selection of ASTM gravel sieves.

Instrumentation:

Force measurement load cells (piezo-electric and strain gauge), LVDTs, extensometers, accelerometers.

Video:

Two channels of NTSC video captured on MiniDV Format. High-speed imager, 10-bit greyscale aggregate of 250kfps at 128x16px with 2.6GB of memory.  I.E. 3000fps at 1024x1024px for 0.7s

Data acquisition:

VMS and Windows NT Client/Server system with signal conditioning, 16 channel @ 16bit resolution capability with data rates up to 200 kHz aggregate.