The physical and mechanical properties of various historical and modern building materials such as mortar, plaster, stone, brick, wood and concrete as well as other types of material such as metal and textiles are determined by destructive and non-destructive experimental methods. The tests carried out in the laboratory are classified into two groups.
Physical Properties Experiments
- The determination of water absorption capacity by weight and volume
- The determination of real density and apparent density (density-unit weight)
- Porosity test
Mechanical Properties Experiments
- Uniaxial Compressive Strength Test
- Bending Strength Test
- Tensile Splitting Strength Test
- Point Load Index Testing
Apart from these tests, others such as Schmidt hammer testing, ultrasonic pulse velocity measurements, Pull off testing, Ve-be test for consistency measurement in concrete and reinforcement detection by pachometer are carried out as non-destructive methods.
Instruments
- Quantachrome-Ultrapyc 1200e Helium Pycnometer
- Quantachrome Corporation Poremaster 33-17 Mercury Porosimeter
- Zwick/Roell Z330RED Universal Testing Machine ( 330 kN capacity)
- YKM Concrete Test Press
- YKM-S221 Point Loading Test Device
- Proceq-N type Schmidt Hammer
- Proceq (PunditLab) Ultrasonic Instrument
- Dyna Z16 Pull off Tester Instrument
- Ve-be Instrument
- BOSCH Gms 120 Professional Pachometer
- Milwaukee DD3-152 Diamond Drill
Apart from these instruments, equipments including mortar grinder, sample cutting and smoothing machines, parallelism measuring tool are also present.