Engineering Unit A
 

Research Labs and Facilities

The Department of Architectural Engineering moved to the newly constructed Engineering Collaborative Research and Education (ECoRE) Building in the summer of 2024. ECoRE features cutting-edge teaching facilities and unique research laboratories, offering revolutionary opportunities for Penn State Architectural Engineering.

For questions about our research facilities and equipment portfolio, please contact Anand Swaminathan at azs5363@psu.edu.

Laboratories

Human Performance Laboratory

This new laboratory offers capabilities for investigating building-occupant interaction and occupant comfort, satisfaction, health and wellness, control algorithms, and indoor environmental quality through the manipulation of multiple room factors, including temperature, humidity, airflow, indoor air quality, lighting, daylighting, and acoustics. This laboratory features:

  • Two side-by-side, nominally identical testing rooms, permitting A/B comparison of differing conditions.
  • Each room has its own dedicated air handler, permitting the independent manipulation of temperature, humidity, and airflow. Each also offers reconfigurable conditioned air delivery and return, allowing investigation of air supply and return from both ceiling and underfloor plena.
  • Each room has a floor-to-ceiling curtain wall, allowing the reconfiguration of the glazing and an exterior rooftop patio, permitting the affixing of novel shading devices.
  • The overhead ceiling is reconfigurable to permit the installation of varying types and configurations of lighting fixtures and sources.

Benchtop Testing Laboratory

This laboratory offers extensive bench space for open investigation of tabletop scale systems and experiments, including electronics fabrication, lighting fixture development, building controls and microgrid simulation, sensor setup, and other small-scale experiments.

Research Groups:

Lighting Laboratory

The Lighting Lab includes parallel immersion bays, parallel light booths, and a photometry lab. Each immersion bay is illuminated by a quartet of 16-LED fixtures equipped with live spectral feedback, enabling precision-optimized spectra for human factors experiments.

Measurement equipment includes illuminance and luminance spectroradiometers, illuminance, luminance, and intensity meters, eye trackers, wearable circadian sensors, and HDR photography for luminance mapping.  These tools are integrated by DMX, DALI, MIDI, and MatLab control systems.

Research Groups:

Immersive Construction Laboratory

The Immersive Construction Laboratory (ICon Lab) is an immersive workspace with advanced visualization systems built to provide an optimal interactive experience for integrated, team-based workshops. Through virtual reality and ample space for collaboration, the workspace pushes interdisciplinary teams together for design, review, or training. The ICon Lab can hold between 20 and 30 people, which enables it to be used for a variety of AEC/FM-related meetings and activities.

  • The ICon Lab features an immersive curved screen, rear-projected by three ultra-high-definition projectors. The system supports 3D visualization and walkthroughs of architectural models via active stereo projection viewed through radiofrequency synchronized glasses and infrared motion tracking technologies.

Research Groups:

Construction Laboratories

The construction laboratories support a broad range of research related to construction visualization, automation, robotics, and the application of advanced sensing technologies for health and safety monitoring on construction sites and in infrastructure management.

  • The lab contains two advanced mobile UGV robots equipped with laser scanners, RGB cameras, color stereo camera, IMU sensors, and a robotic manipulator arm.
  • The facility also includes advanced wearable, immersive technologies, including wireless AR and VR headsets. These can simulate a high-resolution environment for model visualization and digital twin interactions, safety assessments of dangerous occupations, and for virtual training for educational and research purposes. The lab is also equipped with many wearable sensors, including EEG, PPG, EDA, and ST sensors, and eye-tracking devices that can be used for real-time monitoring of workers' mental and physical health.

Research Groups:

Materials Laboratory

A complex of new wet chemistry labs offers facilities for building materials science research, including fume hoods, preparation, processing, and mixing facilities, sample conditioning, and advanced analytical capabilities. Resources available include automated reactors, grinding mills, mixers, balances, pH and conductivity measurement, isothermal calorimetry, rheometry, settling time measurement, and concrete 3D printing, among others. These laboratories are used in the investigation of advanced cementitious materials and glazing coatings.

Research Groups:

Indoor Air Quality Laboratory

The Indoor Air Quality Laboratory houses advanced facilities for research into airborne particulates and bioaerosols both in the laboratory and in the field. These include a wide range of optical and condensation particle counters and particle sizer systems, measuring from 2 nm to large particles; gravimetric sampling equipment; particle generators; particle counter calibration chamber; and research equipment for investigation of particle resuspension mechanisms.

There is also a range of equipment for bioaerosol and ultraviolet germicidal irradiation research, including a biology laboratory suitable for BSL-2 work, UV reactors, biosafety cabinet, viable samplers, incubator, and autoclave. Additionally, there are facilities for the production of protein allergen test dusts.

Research Groups:

Environmental Simulation Chamber

Penn State Architectural Engineering houses a double-sided coupled environmental chamber for experiments into façade performance under coupled solar illumination and temperature/humidity or those requiring wide-range temperature and humidity control. The left-hand chamber offers wide-ranging temperature control, permitting the simulation of outdoor conditions from across the globe, and an array of solar simulation lamps totaling 10 kW, allowing uniform illumination tuned to the solar spectrum of 1 kW/m2. The right-hand chamber is coupled to the left-hand chamber through a 4 ft square opening that may be fitted with a façade section or window unit; this chamber has a smaller temperature control range to mimic indoor conditions. The divider between the two chambers may also be completely removed to permit work under controlled temperature and humidity conditions in a single, larger chamber.

This facility also includes two smaller, reach-in chambers, one offering temperature and humidity control alone and the other also adding solar simulation illumination, as well.

Research Groups:

High Bay Structural Testing Laboratory

The High Bay Structural Testing Laboratory, housed in the Engineering Design and Innovation Building (opened in the summer of 2023), is an 8,000-square-foot shared resource of the College of Engineering offering world-class facilities for the structural testing of building and civil infrastructure components at full scale.

This laboratory includes a 60 ft long x 26 ft wide x 32 ft tall L-shaped strong wall and strong floor designed for 225 kip point loads. This central facility is supported by a 180 GPM hydraulic pump; six servohydraulic actuators ranging from 55 kip and 16 in stroke to 225 kip and 24 in stroke; a high-speed eight-station digital controller; an advanced networked data acquisition system with 116 input channels, all with integrated signal conditioning; a range of sensors; two 20-ton overhead bridge cranes; two forklifts ranging from 4,000 to 10,000-pound capacity; and two scissor lifts reaching 26 and 29 ft.

Additionally, there are three servohydraulic universal testing machines, capable of both monotonic and fatigue testing ranging from 22 to 110 kip, with one 22 kip unit mounted with an environmental chamber and the 110 kip unit able to be mounted with a furnace for fire testing. There is also a 330 kip compression machine for the testing of concrete cylinders and mortar cubes.

There are also a number of defined-purpose testing apparatus, including a custom-built, hydraulically actuated dynamic racking frame capable of simulating in-plane shear seismic loading on wall systems; a uniform load testing facility, utilizing large air-filled bladders to apply out-of-plane uniform loading to wall or roof systems until failure; windborne debris impact testing capabilities, with a compressed air cannon capable of propelling steel ball bearings of varying diameters to test windows and other building components at metered velocities; and two hydraulic beam testing facilities capable of performing flexural bend loading on building beams up to 9 feet in length. These apparatus are supported by a range of smaller hydraulic pumps and air compressors.

Research Groups

Field-Deployable Equipment

The department houses a wide range of handheld and field-deployable equipment supporting both research and teaching. These include a Trimble X7 terrestrial laser scanner; Leica laser rangefinder; panoramic photosphere camera; wireless and wired temperature and humidity sensors; carbon dioxide sensors; VOC sensor; ozone meter; thermal imaging cameras; infrared temperature sensors; hot wire anemometers; sling psychrometers; particle counters; illumination spectrometers; and portable lighting fixtures.

External Research Resources

MorningStar Solar Home

The MorningStar Solar Home is a 100% renewable-energy-powered home on Penn State’s University Park campus that produces all the energy needed for its operation (plus some extra for electric vehicles). The MorningStar is currently used by teachers and faculty across Penn State as an immersive learning destination for teaching and learning about sustainability. It is also used for research in the topics of energy efficiency, renewable energy, and smart grid systems. The home was built by Penn State Architectural Engineering as an entry in the 2007 Soal Decathlon competition by a team of more than 800 students and faculty.

Institute for Computational and Data Sciences

Penn State’s Institute for Computational and Data Sciences (ICDS) provides resources and support for high-performance computing across the university. In addition to support for cloud computing from commercial vendors, ICDS’s flagship Roar Supercomputer offers over 40,000 computational cores, 19 PB of storage, and GPU nodes, along with an extensively supported software stack. 

Materials Research Institute

The Materials Research Institute serves the university by being a crossroads for researchers in materials science from across the disciplines at Penn State and beyond. Through their Materials Characterization and Nanofabrication Labs, they offer shared resources for cutting-edge materials characterization and synthesis techniques.

 
 

About

Globally recognized as a leading architectural engineering department, the mission of the Department of Architectural Engineering at Penn State is to advance the built environment through the development of world-class architectural engineers and research. The vision of the Department of Architectural Engineering at Penn State is to lead the world in innovative education and research to achieve high-performing built environments. Our program emphasizes the scientific and engineering aspects of planning, designing, and constructing buildings, providing our architectural engineering graduates with outstanding education and research opportunities. 

Department of Architectural Engineering

408 Engineering Collaborative Research and Education (ECoRE) Building

556 White Course Dr

The Pennsylvania State University

University Park, PA 16802

Phone: 814-865-6394