An $82,000 investment from Oregon BEST added the infraStructure Testing & Research (iSTAR) Lab at Portland State University to Oregon BEST’s growing network of shared-user, university-based research facilities available to industry.

The investment funds the design and installation of a new inertia mass system, a strong wall, and enhanced data acquisition equipment that allow researchers to test the seismic characteristics of building materials and wall systems. The new inertia mass system combines with the lab’s existing shake table for real-time earthquake simulation of structural components. The strong wall complements the lab’s existing strong floor and other equipment for large-scale testing capability.

PSU professor and Oregon BEST researcher, Peter Dusicka, directs the lab, where a group of 12 students, from PhD candidates to undergraduates, assist with a range of research projects.

The new strong wall enables Dusicka’s team to simulate seismic events and other conditions by applying multi-directional loads and study the effects on wall systems, columns, and other components—especially new, non-conventional materials being developed for the sustainable built environment market.

“Companies are innovating new, greener materials because there is now a market for these,” says Dusicka, who is seeing an increase in queries to the iSTAR Lab from small companies, startups, and individual innovators who don’t have deep funding for research.

“Oregon BEST funded this lab, in part, because there are so many new technologies and materials being developed that are non-conventional due to their green components and consequently have not been thoroughly researched and tested,” Dusicka said. “Building officials who approve construction plans rely on building codes to ensure buildings are safe, but for new materials or new systems that fall outside the code, they often don’t have anything quantifiable to turn to.”

That’s where the expanded iSTAR lab can help.

Serving as an extended research arm for Oregon businesses, the lab allows companies to research and refine new materials and systems to understand their behavior or to develop design guidelines before incurring the costs associated with official certification testing.

“If we can help companies do the research in advance, they can make modifications based on this research and then go into testing with a much higher level of confidence,” said Dusicka, who plans to also develop a library of data and expertise in non-conventional building systems and materials based on the lab’s research.

Dusicka and his team are already working with a range of companies and projects from rural and urban Oregon that include:

• Fagerdala, a Swedish firm with its U.S. office in Portland that sells a construction system that uses a foam-like cement substitute that is five times lighter and more energy efficient than traditional concrete.
• ShelterWorks, a Philomath, Ore. company that makes sustainable building blocks from recycled pallets coated with Portland cement.
• The Oregon Dept. of Transportation (ODOT) and the Oregon Transportation Research and Education Consortium (OTREC), to help analyse and test bridge components for vulnerability and retrofitting options, a project that without the BEST funding might have gone out of state.
• Oregon Iron Works/United Street Car, a Clackamas, Ore. manufacturer that is receiving research assistance from the lab to test strength and fatigue verification of a new streetcar component.