Louisiana State University is, by any standard, a major Research I national university. In enrollment, it ranks 20th in size in the Untied States, having some 30,000 students. It has been designated as the capstone of higher education in Louisiana by the Louisiana State of Regents. In this regard, the University, the College of Engineering and the Department of Civil Engineering find themselves in enviable positions. Students have access to a library with vast holdings, some one and one-half million volumes, and to the high performance computing facility at the Office of Computing Services. The latter facility is currently equipped with a 48-node IBM SP and RS/6000 cluster. In addition, there are more than 10 computer labs with over 800 PCs available to all students. Independently the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering maintains six terminals linked to the University computer system and thirty-seven micro-computers related to sub-discipline research

Since our 1978 move to the Center for Engineering and Business Administration, the College and the Department have greatly increased its laboratory space and facilities for experimental research. The Department now maintains separate, well equipped laboratories in the following fields:

• Remote Sensing
• Geotechnical Engineering
• Hydraulics
• Mechanics of Materials
• Photogrammetry
• Structures
• Water Resources Research
• Environmental Engineering (water chemistry, analytical chemistry,wet chemistry, hazardous waste materials)
• Transportation Engineering Materials (asphalt, concrete, geosynthetics)
• Pavement Research (accelerated loading)

A list some of the available research labs follows:

 

Advanced Computational Solid Mechanics Laboratory:

Professor Voyiadjis is the director of the Advanced Computational Solid Mechanics Laboratory (CSM) in the Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering (CEE). The CSM laboratory has a network of Pentium-based PC's as well as Silicon Graphics and Digital Unix workstations. In addition the laboratory also has a Microway’s Beowulf type distributed computing system which consists of a cluster of 16 node dual processor Athlon cluster for a total of 32 CPU's. Each node of the cluster has 256 MB of DDR SDRAM and 20 GB Ultra ATA 100 disk. This system is primarily used as a compute engine and the results of the model simulations are visualized on a Silicon Graphics Onyx 3200 system. The cluster and the visualization platform are tightly integrated using a Gigabit ethernet interconnect.

Experimental, modeling and computational research on the mechanics of materials is carried out in the LSU CEE department. Modeling involves the bridging of length scales using representative volume elements (RVE) and sub RVEs. For computational research, Alpha workstations with parallel processors are in place in the Computational Solid Mechanics Laboratory.

 

Supermike:

The general-purpose, parallel supercomputer christened “Supermike” (supermike.lsu.edu) is the second largest computer in the academic world and the 11th fastest in the world. The Beowulf-class supercomputer enhances the high-performance-computing resources that are available to Louisiana's students and academic researchers in various subfields of information technology. LSU’s supercomputer is composed of 1,024 Xeon DP processors that are tightly coupled through Myricom's myrinet network, with each processor containing four Intel Pentium 4 processors. The system contains 1 Terabyte of RAM and more than 40 Terabytes of disk storage.

 

Geotechnical Engineering Laboratory:

The geotechnical engineering laboratories are equipped to conduct all the standard physical and engineering properties tests on soils including gradation, specific gravity, Atterberg limits, permeability, shear strength, compaction, and consolidation. One unique feature of the geotechnical laboratories is that posses two true cubical triaxial testing devices (for low and high pressure testing regiomes). These devices are fully equipped with data acquisition systems.

Advanced Monitoring and Imaging of Geo-materials Laboratory:

This laboratory is equipped with advanced data acquisition, signal conditioning, and processing systems for the imaging and monitoring of geo-materials and geo-processes. Other instrumentation include accelerometers, load cells, pore pressure transducers, displacement transducers, oscilloscopes, digital cameras, microscope, and digitizing boards. 

LSU-CALCHAS (LSU-Calibration Chamber System

URL: http://www.coe.lsu.edu/facilities/lsu-calchas.html): The department has a fully computerized calibration chamber developed with National Science Foundation and Federal Highway Administration funding for the laboratory investigation under controlled boundary conditions of in-situ soil parameters during intrusion.

REVEGITS (Research Vehicle for Geotechnical In Situ Testing & Support) and CIMCPT (Continuous Intrusion Miniature Cone Penetration Test

URL: http://www.coe.lsu.edu/facilities/revegits-cimcpt.html): The Research Vehicle for Geotechnical In Situ Testing and Support (REVEGITS) incorporates state-of-the-art technology for in situ site exploration. This unique system developed by National Science Foundation funding is capable of performing a variety of intrusion tests including standard cone penetration test (CPT), piezo-cone penetration test (PCPT), conductivity (C-CPT), seismic (S-PCPT), and miniature cone penetration tests (M-CPT). REVEGITS represents hi-tech equipment, hardware and software for an environmentally contained cone penetrometer system mounted on a self-sufficient vehicle. 

Through funding from Federal Highway Administration Priority Technologies Program a miniaturized version of the CPT technology was developed and implemented as a Continuous Intrusion Miniature Cone Penetration Test system (CIMCPT). The self-contained CIMCPT consists of a four-wheel drive all-terrain vehicle with an extra cab equipped with a computer controlled data acquisition system. A novel feature of this new in-situ testing vehicle is the caterpillar-type continuous push device powered by a hydraulic motor for advancing the cone penetrometer which greatly increases productivity and serviceability.

The department has access to these research facilities through the Louisiana Transportation Research Center (LTRC), sponsored jointly by Louisiana State University and the Louisiana Department of Transportation and Development.

     

Louisiana Transportation Research Center (LTRC): sponsored jointly by Louisiana State University and the Louisiana Department of Transportation and Development, this center (URL: http://www.ltrc.lsu.edu) provides research, technology transfer, technical assistance, engineering personnel training, and continuing education. It conducts an in-house program, coopera-tive programs with the Department of Civil and Envi-ronmental Engineering at LSU, and a contract research program. The annual research budget is approximately $7 million. The Pavement Research Facility incorpo-rates the Accelerated Loading Facility (ALF) full-scale accelerated loading pavement testing system. The Engineering Materials Characterization and Research Facility (EMCRF) has an advanced Superpave asphalt testing suite for performance-based binder and mixture specifications. 

The Materials Characterization, Modeling, Simulation and Visualization Laboratory (MCMSV) houses a MTS and a UMATTA materi-als testing system, an imaging analysis and visualiza-tion system, and computational facilities that use a High Performance Computation (HPC) service.

The LSU Transportation Laboratory is a cross-disciplinary research facility housed in the LSU Division of Engineering Research Center provides computing and traffic monitoring facili-ties for work in the areas of traffic operations, intelligent transportation systems, traffic control devices, hurri-cane evacuation, travel demand modeling, and road-way inventory systems. The LSU Remote Sensing and Image Processing Laboratory, the LSU Hurri-cane Center, facilities are also available. (URL: http://www.translab.lsu.edu/)  

Remote Sensing and Image Processing Facilities: The Remote Sensing and Image Processing (URL: http://www.rsip.lsu.edu) Facilities is an interdisciplinary facility in the College of Engineering. Faculty from Civil and Electrical engineering work collaboratively on applications such as real-time traffic signal control, image-based vehicle detection, GPS-based vehicle location systems, distributed control of civil infrastructure systems, automated pavement condition assessment, automatic aircraft classifications systems, and real-time traffic simulation systems. Graduate students involved in these projects are affiliated with Civil engineering, Electrical engineering, Computer Science, and Geography. The unit has a variety of computer equipment including: Sun Workstations, NT Pentium Workstations, large format plotters, color printers, color scanners, and digital video editing peripherals.

Environmental Engineering Facilities: The Department has seven Environmental Engineering laboratory facilities. Two laboratories are dedicated to undergraduate and graduate instruction, and wet chemistry analysis. Other research facilities include the water/wastewater treatment laboratory, environmental engineering microbiology laboratory, hazardous waste treatment research laboratory, subsurface environment research laboratory, and aquaculture laboratory. Facilities are well equipped with GC with MS, GC with other detectors, HPLC, atomic absorption unit, two particle size analyzers, liquid scintillation counter, high-speed centrifuge, UV/VIS spectrophotometer, and other routine laboratory equipment. Researchers from the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering are also provided access to other sophisticated equipment such as electron microscopes through cooperation with other engineering laboratories and the Hazardous Waste Research Center Laboratory in the college of engineering. Other laboratories which support activities on a cooperative basis include the Wetland Soils and Sedimentation lab, the Agronomy Soil Physics labs, Chemical and Petroleum Engineering labs, and various Marine Science labs.

Center for Advanced Microstructures and Devices (CAMD): The synchrotron x-ray microtomography investigations will be conducted at the LSU Center for Advanced Microstructures and Devices (CAMD - URL: http://www.camd.lsu.edu) facility. This synchrotron facility was first operated in 1992 with $25 million from the Department of Energy. The synchrotron at CAMD is a 1.5 GeV light source with white-light and monochromator beamlines. CAMD has a state-funded staff of over 30 and an annual budget of $4.1 million. CAMD has had a great deal of success in high-technology research and has been designated a National Center of Excellence by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). In addition to be a powerful state resource for research and technology, its close association with LSU allows CAMD to employ a significant number of undergraduate and graduate students. The microtomography station is being installed on the CAMD bending magnet with a maximum energy of about 15 KeV. It is anticipated that by 2001-2002, the station will be placed on the wiggler beamline, which will provide usable photons to >50 KeV.

Quantitative Imaging and Computational Simulation Laboratory
The facilities in this laboratory can be divided into three categories: 1) microstructure characterization facilities 2) computational and visualization facilities and 3) software.

Microstructure Characterization Facilities.  Microstructure characterization facilities involve the use of various “microscopes” to “see” and characterize the microstructural artifacts. The fifth generation x-ray tomograpgy image analyzer (Figure A.1) with high penetrating capability and high resolution is the major piece of research equipment in this category. The system is housed in 2408A CEBA, the Quantitative Imaging and Computational Simulation (QICS) laboratory. This laboratory also houses an optical imaging and analysis system (Figure A.2, magnification up to 40X), and an infrared imaging system These microscopes can characterize material microstructures at mesoscale and above.

Computational and Visualization Facilities. The High Performance Computation (HPC) system at the university level, and various workstations at the departmental level are availabe at LSU. The QICS laboratory houses a SGI workstation (Figure A.3) that has remote access to the HPC on campus. These facilities are efficient for image processing, image analysis, data analysis, simulation, and visualization.

Software. The HPC systems and the various workstations and clusters provide a platform for running various application software. They also provide different software developing tool packages including C and parallel Fortran compilers, and MS Visual Studio. Several specific software packages including a Finite Element (FE) code ABAQUS, DEM code PFC3D version 2.0, visualization software package VoxBlast, and Image Pro-Plus 4.0 for image processing and analysis are available in the QICS laboratory. Other programs developed by the researchers in this group are conveniently accessible to graduate students and undergraduate students for research and education purposes.

Figure A.1 ACTIS 150/225 Fifth Generation, Dual Energy CT Scanner

Figure A.2 Leica Microscope, Infared Imaging and Image Analysis System

Figure A.3 FLIR PM 675 Infrared Camera

Figure A.4. Octane SGIWorkstation with Dual Processors

 

LSU Libraries: Collections containing 2.9 million volumes, microfilm holdings of more than 4 million, and a manuscript collection of more than 12 million items. Middleton Library serves as a main library, with special collections housed in the adjacent Hill Memorial Library. Materials in the fields of chemistry, biochemistry, and chemical engineering are located in the Chemistry Library, Williams Hall. The CEBA Reading Room contains reserve materials for business and engineering courses. The Design Resource Center is located in the Design Building. Access to these facilities is available via the internet, both locally and remotely. A campus-wide computer network allows access to the library catalog (LOLA). LSU is part of the Louisiana Online University Information Systems (LOUIS) The library system contains many of the journals relevant to this project. LSU Uncover allows for the ordering of articles from periodicals and journals not owned by Louisiana State University.