Facilities

 ATLSS

Lehigh University’s Advanced Technology for Large Structural Systems (ATLSS) Engineering Research Cente houses a portfolio of equipment that supports the research and educational efforts of the Centers faculty, staff, and students, including: 

• Large-Scale Multi-Directional Experimental Facility: a major facility for large-scale structural testing.

• Natural Hazards Engineering Research Infrastructure (NHERI) Real-Time Multi-directional (RTMD) cyber-physical structural systems testing facility equipped to generate multi-directional static and real-time dynamic loads. 

• Fritz Laboratory: 800,000 lb and 5,000,000 lb universal testing machines, and a dynamic test bed with broad fatigue-testing capabilities, and a wide range of instrumentation. 

• Field Monitoring: a fully equipped field testing cargo van with a mobile office, and a wide variety of tools, instrumentation, and other supplies regularly required for field monitoring projects.

• Mechanical Testing Laboratory capable of standard mechanical property tests of metallic, cementitious and composite construction materials. 

• Metallography and Microscopy Laboratory equipped for metallographic sample preparation and material characterization by light optical and electron microscopy techniques with hardness and micro hardness capabilities. 

• Non-destructive Evaluation Laboratory equipped to perform basic laboratory and field evaluation work on steel and concrete materials and structures.

• Laboratory of Advanced Integrated Technology for Intelligent Structures (LAITIS) equipped with advanced wired and wireless sensors, portable and stationary data acquisition systems, and hardware and software for developing and testing prototype integrated sensing platforms for laboratory small- and large-scale, and field testing. 

ERC 

The Energy Research Center laboratory space includes:

• a fully equipped mercury research laboratory with test rigs for dry sorbent injection and catalyst testing  

• laboratory-scale fluidized bed models with AGET FT40-SP fabric filter

• a coal flow loop for two-phase flow studies and a particle-seeded gas test apparatus equipped with two 650 scfm Ingersoll-Rand SSR-XF125 compressors/Airtek SC-1200 refrigerated air dryer

• a Photon System MC-1000 reactor for algae culturing

• a Lindberg TGA furnace, a Sentro Tech STT-1200C tube furnace

• a laboratory for thermal energy storage research  

• workstations and computers with access to related licensed industry-standard modeling and analysis software packages  

SMRT Lab

The Smart Microgrid and Renewable Technology (SMRT) lab is a power converter based microgrid testbed. The facility consists of four types of subsystems:

• two real-time simulators (RTS) 

• two microgrid testbeds 

• two modular multilevel converters (MMCs)

• and one multi-agent system (MAS) 

Turbulent Flow Lab

The Turbulent Flow laboratory is home to a water tunnel facility that is used for laboratory scale testing of renewable energy systems. Turbulence generation techniques using enhanced Makita type active grids have been developed in the laboratory to introduce enhanced levels of tunable free stream turbulence, gradients of velocity and turbulence kinetic energy Turbulence intensity in the range 2-25% can be obtained using these protocols. A maximum velocity of 1.1 m/s can be obtained.