Julie Vanderbossche, PhD 

Phone: 412-624-9879
Email:  jmv7@pitt.edu 

The Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering Pavement Mechanics and Materials Laboratory has developed into an all-encompassing laboratory equipped to perform a full range of tasks including the casting, curing and testing of everything from concrete specimens to full-scale pavements.  The 2700 ft ² facility features the latest equipment in both destructive and non-destructive testing of portland cement concrete.  Housed within the lab are two environmentally controlled rooms.  The 1007 ft ³ room can be adjusted to replicate a wide range of environmental conditions for curing portland cement concrete test specimens while the 630 ft ³ room is maintained at a constant temperature and humidity for determining the drying-shrinkage properties of concrete in accordance with ASTM-157.  The laboratory is equipped with everything needed for measuring basic aggregate properties such as the gradation, absorption capacity and specific gravity, as well as, more detailed characterizations such as determining wear resistance using the Los Angeles abrasion machine or running a micro-deval test.  A 5.5 ft ²  concrete mixer and all other necessary tools for casting concrete specimens are available along with equipment for measuring the properties of fresh concrete.  A ball mill is available for cement production as well as a jaw crusher for establishing aggregate gradations.  The laboratory is equipped to test the more basic properties of hardened concrete, such as, strength, elastic modulus and Poisson's ratio along with the more elaborate testing equipment needed for measuring such things as the dynamic modulus, thermal coefficient or fracture toughness of concrete.  Some of the sample preparation equipment available in the laboratory includes a concrete saw, core machine and a fume hood for sulfur capping.  The laboratory houses a Baldwin compression machine that can be used to apply loads up to 200,000 lbs as well as a 400,000 lb Test Mark compression machine.  A multitude of tests can also be performed using the 7-channel MTS TestStar Controller.  The controller can be used for performing dynamic testing using a closed-loop servo hydraulic test machine.  This system can be fed by either a 10 gpm or 60 gpm hydraulic pump.  The lab also houses an accelerated vehicle simulation loading frame for testing full-scale pavement sections. A family of Campbell Scientific data loggers and accompanying multiplexer and interface hardware is also available as well as a couple of high frequency data acquisitions systems.

Kevin Chen, PhD
pec9@pitt.edu

Researchers in PIRL under the direction of Kevin Chen, PhD, engage in interdisciplinary research in optics science, nanomanufacturing, and applied photonics. PIRL has strong capabilities in laser instrument developments and also superiorly equipped with state-of-the-art commercial laser systems.

Photonics Instrumentation Developments: PIRL researchers have strong capabilities on developing highly sophisticate laser instruments with unique characteristics not available in commercial markets. Some examples include:

Fiber Lasers : our group have developed a number of high-power (1-50 nJ), femtosecond (30-200 fs) fiber lasers for 1.0- (Yb), 1.5- (Er), and 1.9-mm (Tm) doped fiber lasers capable of both soliton and dissipative soliton outputs.

Femtosecond Solid State Lasers : Our group have developed (and currently equipped) with ultra-short pulse (< 10 fs) Tunable, Ti-Sapphire laser with high output power.

Portable Solid State Lasers : Our group possesses unique capability on developing powerful ultra-compact solid state lasers for homeland security, medicine, and remote sensing applications. We have capability on developing compact YAG laser with >10 mJ and <1 ns pulse output with weight less than 1000 gram.

PIRL scientists also developed a number of cutting-edge sensing instruments. The instrumentation development is supported by state-of-the-art of simulation and CAD tools including COMSOL, OPTIWAVE, ZEMAX, SOLIDWORK, ANSYS, ALLEGRO, and CANDENCE.  We developed customer software to for nonlinear fiber optics for high-power fiber laser design. 

Scientific and engineering research in PIRL is also supported by state-of-the-art of commercial equipment. These include:

High-power coherent ultrafast laser system for research on optics science and laser manufacturing from nano-scale to macro-scale.

Sophisticate adaptive optical laser pulse and laser beam shaping tool for parallel laser processing and precise laser matter interaction control at femtosecond time-scale and nano-meter spatial scale.

Multi-axis high-precision motion control systems with better than 0.1-mm bi-directional repeatability (10-nm resolution) over 2 feet travel distance along all axes.

Fully automatic guided wave photonic measurement capability and lightwave chip bonding capability.

Deep UV excimer laser systems (>1-J/pulse) at both 193-nm and 248-nm for laser processing.

Multiple high-power YAG laser (sub-ns) with frequency double and triple output for laser induced breakdown spectroscopy, mid-IR generation, and spectroscopy studies.

Continuous wave Ti-sapphire laser system tunable from 700 nm to 1000 nm with 1-W output power.

800-W VCSEL pump lasers with fast switching time.

>500-W diode pump lasers for fiber laser development

18-W single frequency diode pump laser (Coherent Verdi-18)

Sophisticate spectroscopy equipment including multiple spectrometers for UV, visible, near-IR, and mid-IR measurement (200-nm to 10-mm). Si ICCD camera and InGaAs CCD camera are available for weak signal and IR imaging applications.

Customer-developed time-domain measurement for sub-fs pulse measurement at 1-mm, 1.5-mm, 1.9-mm, and 2.8-mm.

Together with world-leading medical experts from UPMC, PIRL research engages in endoscopic therapies and diagnostics research to determine cancer margins, to develop minimal invasive cardiovascular surgical procedures, and to improve outcome of kidney disease treatment.

PIRL has unique expertise on development and applications of radioactive micro-sources , which can be widely used for biomedical and homeland security applications.

Physical Metallurgy and Materials Design Laboratory

http://www.pitt.edu/~weixiong

Wei Xiong
Assistant Professor, Ph.D. & D.Eng.
Physical Metallurgy & Materials Design Laboratory
Dept of Mechanical Engineering & Materials Science
University of Pittsburgh

Email: weixiong@pitt.edu

Address:
606 Benedum Hall
3700 OHara Street
Pittsburgh, PA 15261
Office phone: (412) 383-8092
Dept Fax: (412) 624-4846

Directed by Wei Xiong, PhD, the physical metallurgy and materials design (PMMD) lab performs research on different kinds of advanced materials, targeting high performance of materials in various engineering applications. The design fundamental tool is an integration of atomistic modeling, CALPHAD materials thermodynamics and diffusion kinetics, which are indispensable for microstructure optimization. The multidisciplinary research combines efforts on physical metallurgy, applied mechanics, quantum mechanics, hierarchy of materials microstructure characterization, and thermodynamic behavior analysis.

The PMMD lab has close collaborations with many national labs and industrial companies, such as Thermo-Calc Software Inc, NIST, Caterpillar, GM, QuesTek, Quad City Manufacturing Lab, and Argonne National Lab.

Our current research are but not limited to: (1) thermodynamic and kinetic investigation of strengthening in engineering alloy design (2) materials and processing design for advanced manufacturing (3) modern computational thermodynamics for hard and soft matters (4) high throughput experimental methods and materials design genomic database development.

Students and researchers with interests on materials and manufacturing design are highly welcome to join the PMMD lab. We try our best to transfer fundamental research to useful engineering technology.