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NEWS
| OCTOBER 26, 2005
Facilities
UTA, company plan U.S.’s largest
center
The facility, to be built in Grand
Prairie, will be able to house full-scale models.
By C
J Patton
The Shorthorn staff
The university is collaborating with Hanson PLC to build the largest
structural research center in the nation.
Hanson, a heavy building materials company, has donated land for
the center near the company’s concrete pipe manufacturing
plant in Grand Prairie, as well as a significant portion of the
financial costs, said Ali Abomaali, civil engineering assistant
professor.
Dr. Abolmaali, who will be the center’s director, said he
hopes to break ground within two to three months and expects the
revolutionary facility to take roughly a year to complete.
“We’ll put the university as one of the top structural
research facilities in the world,” he said. “We’re
hoping, if things go right, we will have it open by January ’07.”
Abolmaali said the center will be much larger than the current campus
structural research lab, with reinforced walls and floors to allow
testing on actual-size models.
“We will test full-scale bridges, full-scale buildings,”
he said. “This thing is going to be 55 feet high, so we can
test up to four-story buildings.”
Abolmaali said the ability to construct full-scale models for testing
eliminates many calculation errors common in scale-model testing.
With this new center and its expansive space, he said the university
will begin seeing more funds from state and national agencies such
as the Department of Defense, the National Science Foundation, Texas
Department of Transportation and the Federal Emergency Management
Agency.
Abolmaali said the center’s research will focus on full-scale
bridges and buildings, testing criteria with potential impact across
a broad spectrum of applications.
“We’re going to look at the effects of earthquakes on
buildings, the effects of blasts on buildings for anti-terrorism,
the effects of fire on buildings,” he said.
When operable, Abolmaali said, the center will push UTA’s
prestige to global proportions including possibly large increases
in funds and enrollment.
“This is so big, both for the university and for D/FW. This
basically puts us at the same level as Berkeley, Illinois and Purdue,”
he said. “Within five years, we will be known worldwide.”
Joe Lundy, Hanson’s chief structural engineer, said his company
entered the collaboration to return some of the benefits it has
received from the university’s structural research work. Further,
he said as the quality of structural engineering research increases,
his company benefits with better products.
Lundy said Hanson, which has worked with the university on various
projects over the past three years, will also benefit from the center
with continued partnership developing and improving the design of
structural products.
“We would perhaps develop a new type of infrastructure product,
and we need validation of a design criterion,” he said. “Then,
the structural engineering research center would do tests on a full-scale,
physical model to either validate our design or send it back.”
However, Lundy said Hanson’s collaboration isn’t an
effort to increase profits. He said all companies in the industry
stand to benefit from the research and that the agreement doesn’t
include any special consideration for Hanson.
“As a center they’re going to go after research projects
that they think they can apply their center to, to improve the quality
of structural research in general,” he said. “Our projects
will be a small part — they’re free to do whatever they
want to do.”
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