Force and Flexibility
Force and flexibility (Length 1:34)
The lab is made up of a lot of different pieces that all kind of work together to allow us to do the research that we do there. The foundation of it is the strong floor that we have, which is a very thick, five–foot thick, reinforced concrete slab. Slab is kind of the wrong word to use probably. Let’s say a very thick reinforced concrete footing, a very large mass of concrete, heavily reinforced. Every four foot on center we have hold downs that are anchored to the very bottom of that mass of concrete. It allows us to anchor down our reaction frames, which are modular, so we can change the spans and the configurations. And therefore we can put in any kind of structural components that anybody might be able to think about. Whether it’s a column or a bridge girder or even a wall component out of a building or a bridge, and be able to subject those to the forces they might be subjected to in the field, and beyond, to actually produce loads that can fail those elements. And that means you have to able to apply very large forces. And the largest force we’ve been able to apply in the laboratory to our specimens is about a million pounds or so, which is a pretty substantial amount of load to be able to react, for one thing, on that floor and to apply in general with those large steel reaction frames.