Testing Facilities

This impressive piece of equipment places the school at the forefront of UK research into the performance of building materials and diagnostic methods of testing material failure.

The twin environmental chamber allows materials, up to 2.5 metres square, to be placed in simulated conditions encompassing every type of weather our climate can produce, including the effects of freezing and thawing, high humidity, driving rain and solar heating (the chamber can be programmed to reach temperatures of -20°C and go up to 40°C).  The impact on materials- whether a single brick, block, material sample or part of a wall can be evaluated by the Centre’s skilled staff.

The British-made equipment is the only one of its kind in the UK and it is currently used to offer services to companies involved in the manufacture of building materials, especially external finished (renders, cladding and the like) and insulations systems.  Safety and protective clothing can also be tested for its weatherproof qualities.

The eMotion Laboratory is a unique facility available to Caledonian Creates' clients. Developed to capture the subtle palette of human emotion, the lab examines players' physiological measures of involvement with games. Monitoring pupil dilation and game pad techniques the lab is totally unobtrusive, with experiments taking place in a living-room style setting.

Typical clients are leisure-based software developers, those building emotionally contingent business applications, and health technology professionals. In six months, Microsoft, Genuine Games and Onisoft have all worked with the games team.

Click here to visit the emotion website.

The mercury intrusion porosimeter allows the accurate measurement of microstructural characteristics (pore size, structure and distribution) of porous materials. These properties impact on aspects of performance such as moisture movement, heat transfer and durability. The equipment can also be used to measure compressibility of non-porous materials such as insulation materials. This is the only porosimeter in Scotland.

The scanning tunneling microscope (STM) provides a picture of the atomic arrangement of a surface by sensing corrugations in the electron density of the surface that arise from the positions of surface atoms. This can be used to study protective coatings and help in improving their effectiveness. A finely sharpened tungsten wire (or "tip") is first positioned within 2 nanometers of the specimen by a piezoelectric transducer. If a small voltage (bias) is applied between the tip and the sample, then a net current of electrons (the "tunneling current") flows through the vacuum gap in the direction of the bias. For a suitably sharpened tip--one that terminates ideally in a single atom--the tunneling current is confined laterally to a radius of a few tenths of a nanometer. The remarkable spatial resolution of the STM derives from this lateral confinement of the current.

The thermal imaging camera is used to carry out rapid surveys of buildings to determine the quality of the insulated envelope.  It can pick up defects in design and installation that lead to increased heat loss and risks of condensation and mould within the building.

The School is fortunate to have one of four such systems in the world (two in the US and one in Denmark).  This equipment enables the study of moisture movement in materials and the measurement of parameters used in modelling of heat and moisture transport in building envelopes.   It is used extensively to support the centres work on developing accurate and practical methods of measuring moisture content in walls, etc. to monitor, for example, the drying out process after flooding.