OXFORD,
Miss. – The Department of Civil Engineering at the University of
Mississippi celebrates the grand opening of its new technology
laboratories Friday (April 17).
The event begins at 11:45 a.m.
inside the old Wal-Mart building at the Oxford Mall on West Jackson
Avenue. The 11,000-square-foot facility houses labs for transportation
modeling and visualization, nano-infrastructure research, concrete
durability and geotechnical research. Mechanical engineering labs are
to be added later.
“Renovation by D. Carroll Construction of
Oxford was completed in February,” said Alex Cheng, chair and professor
of civil engineering. “Moving and furnishing of existing equipment has
been in stages and is not 100 percent complete. But work has been
conducted in the lab since March.”
Equipment still to come for the facility include a Hopkinson bar for testing material failure properties and a shock tube for blast and impact studies, Cheng said.
“Alumni support through the School of Engineering Advisory Board is the major reason why the university administration granted this new facility,” he said. “The half-million-dollar project was funded by the provost’s office, engineering dean’s office and civil engineering.”
Engineering students are to display concrete canoes and steel bridges they entered in the American Society of Civil Engineers’ annual Deep South Region competition, Cheng said. Other points of interest include various faculty research projects, such as studies of Sardis Lake water quality, retrofitting of New Orleans levees, and earthquake and disaster preparation in northern Mississippi.
“Research projects of special interest are the nano materials for protecting buildings against terrorist threat and composite materials for the new generation of Navy DD(X) class ships,” he said.
For more information, contact Cheng at 662-915-5362 or visit http://www.olemiss.edu/depts/civil?eng/ .