Lab Renovations Include Unique All-In-One Concrete Testing

The Department of Civil, Architectural, and Environmental Engineering at Illinois Institute of Technology recently celebrated upgrades to modernize its Concrete Materials and Structures Lab. 

Assistant Professor of Civil Engineering Matthew Gombeda has replaced most of the lab’s concrete mixing and batching equipment and has added new compression testing machines for hardened concrete samples, which helps him prepare specimens for testing.

The lab has a long history at Illinois Tech, first established in the 1970s. 

“We didn’t start from scratch, we made use of what was there and upgraded,” says Gombeda.

This included rebuilding the structural testing bay with a reaction wall and floor, allowing him to do larger tests.

“We have a unique ability in our lab now that some other labs don’t have where we can batch a pretty large amount of concrete on one side and then test beams and larger structural components about 60 feet away, so it’s an all-in-one unit,” says Gombeda.

The lab is used for a combination of teaching and research. Civil engineering students spend time in the lab as part of required concrete materials and structures courses, during which they mix and test their own concrete and are able to watch concrete beams being tested.

“I think it’s really valuable because now the students can see the actual mechanisms of failure—the underlying behavior—of the concrete,” says Gombeda. “That is the premise for all of the codes and design provisions that we use to make buildings and bridges, so they’re learning it on such a fundamental level.”

The new lab equipment helps improve the students’ workforce readiness by giving them experience on the modern equipment that they would expect to see as they go out into the real world and work in these areas. 

On the research side, Gombeda and his students now have greater capabilities to do more experiments in-house.

Gombeda has been using the new equipment for an ongoing project, funded by the United States Department of Energy, exploring the benefits of using fly ash in concrete.  

The new setup allowed Gombeda and his team to mix many different batches of concrete, evaluate a range of the concrete’s properties just after mixing, and then do long-term monitoring of the properties over multiple weeks.

“​​We’re focused on precast concrete, which is fabricated ahead of time and then has to be moved around, so we’re doing some trials with lifting and handling the beams and walls in our high bay with an overhead crane,” says Gombeda. “We’re really able to take advantage of all the resources that we have now.”

Additional funding for the project came from a donation by Burt Lewis (CE ’48) and an Illinois Tech faculty startup fund.

Image: Associate at Thornton Tomasetti Kevin Mueller, Senior Engineer at Thornton Tomasetti Daksh Patel (CE ’19), and Kurt Ordillas (CE/M.Eng. TE ’20, Ph.D. CE Candidate) in the Concrete Materials and Structures Lab