Other Labs and Facilities

In addition to the facilities available for research and testing in the PHRC and Architectural Engineering labs,  there are facilities in many other labs and centers on the Penn State University Park campus that can be used for PHRC research and testing.  Some of these facilities are noted below:

• The Center for High Performance Building Systems (CHiPBS) at Penn State has unique facilities and partnerships for conducting the R&D required to establish specific materials, component and subsystems innovations needed to realize HPB systems and to demonstrate, quantitatively, the values of these innovations in the context of building system performance.
• The Penn State Sustainability is a unique entity at Penn State that focuses on the critical interfaces between sustainable technologies and the practices that will put these technologies into action.
• The Civil Infrastructure Testing and Evaluation Laboratories (CITEL) is a laboratory facility that focuses on improving civil infrastructure and also features loading equipment of up to 220 kips and high-speed data acquisition equipment.  Some of the capabilities of this facility include a concrete mixing area, environmental chambers that can simulate a number of climatic conditions, a composite materials laboratory, an accelerated pavement testing facility, computational facilities for advanced infrastructure analysis, and a 10,000-sq.-ft. structures laboratory for large- or small-scale testing. 
• The Composites Manufacturing Technology Center (CMTC) is a modern lab facility used for fabrication, characterization, and performance evaluation of composite structures.  CMTC is associated with the Department of Engineering Science and Mechanics at Penn State University.  CMTC is also the center of inter-departmental research in advanced structural composites in the College of Engineering.  Equipment in this lab include facilities for fabrication, characterization, and performance evaluation of laboratory-scale and full-scale composite structures.
• The Materials Characterization Lab (MCL) at Penn State offers affordable access to a wide range of state-of-the-art analytical instrumentation for materials research and analysis such as electron microscopy, particle analysis, thermal analysis and spectroscopy facilities.  MCL instrumentation can be used for PHRC projects requiring the application of specialized material analysis techniques.