Facilities and Equipment
Sustainable & Adaptive Built Environment (SABE) Lab at The University of Tennessee is founded and directed by the Dr. Hongyu Zhou and his colleagues, which is dedicated to the structural, material, and system innovation for energy-efficient and adaptive built environment. It features a 1000 ft2 lab in the Science and Engineering Research Facility (SERF), concrete 3-D printing facilities in John Tickle Engineering Building, and material characterization facilities in the UTK-ORNL Joint Institute of Advanced Materials (JIAM). In addition, the lab has also acquired field test capabilities through a set of NI wireless sensor network for field measurements pertaining to structural behaviors (strains, vibrations) as well as the energy behavior of building envelopes, measurement of solar intensities etc. A "Smart and Green Building" testbed (a 500 ft2 outdoor facility) is currently under development with UTK Facility Services.
Mini Hot Box Apparatus
Mini-size hot box apparatus developed by the research group to study the thermal behavior of building envelope components.
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US Patent Pending
Concrete 3D Printer
Customized benchtop concrete 3D printer (gantry style) with effective printing volume of 1m x 1m x 0.6m with various nozzle shape, size.
ESPEC Environmental Chamber
-40C-200C temperature range + 0-95% RH
Added metal halide (MH) light for incident solar radiation simulation
HotDisk TPS1500 Thermal Constant Analyzer
Transient Plane Source (TPS) method to measure thermal conductivity, diffusivity, and specific heat of materials (k range 0.01-200 W/mK)
StellarNet Spectrophotometer
StellarNet BlackComet spectrometer 290-2200nm
Vis light source 280-760nm
Near infrared light source
Integrating sphere for transmittance and reflectance measurements
Polymer Synthesis & Characterization
The lab has basic in-house polymer (and other chemicals) synthesis and characterization capabilities. More advanced characterizations are performed at the PCL at JIAM (PI has full access): https://chem.utk.edu/facilities/pcl/pcl-instruments/
Thermoplastic compounding & Pelleting
Benchtop single and twin-screw extruders for thermoplastic compounding, filament production, and pelleting.
Mechanical Testing
The lab has several load frames with 2000lbf, 22k lbf, and 55k lbf capacities, capable of testing material samples under static (tension, compression, bending, torsion), and dynamic load condition. Equipped with 3D DIC for deformation, crack analysis.
