Materials Lab Exercises

Introduction into the basic and practical knowledge of important building materials and testing methods.

• Introduction of material testing equipment, with various examples of experiments on metals (tensile behaviour, hardness, bending and impact loading).
• Theoretical background and practical aspects of concrete technology: mixture design, casting and setting; determination of mechanical properties.
• Properties of bricks and mortar: individual materials and the composite brickwork. Parameters like strength, Young’s modulus, water absorption and thermal conductivity are determined.
• Understanding the characteristic properties of wood: anisotropy, hygroscopic behaviour, shrinkage and swelling, and effect of size on strength. Introduction to test-methods for wood and wood-products.
• Introduction into the basics of scanning electron microscopy: practical exercises with the Environmental Scanning Electron Microscope (ESEM).
• Introduction to durability of building materials and building structures: assessment of potentials for detecting and locating corrosion of steel reinforcement in concrete.
• Introduction to fundamentals of Finite Element Methods and their application in examples.
• Introduction into basic properties of the mineral binder cement, lime and gypsum. Tests are also carried out with various binders.
• The structure, production and classification of polymeric plastics are explained. In addition, the topics of joining technology and long-term behavior of plastics are discussed.