The following outlines some of the available facilities and equipment used by the Carleton Hybrid Simulation Research Group. All of the facilities and equipment are housed in the Minto Centre for advanced studies in engineering.
Laboratory Facilities
The department of Civil and Environmental Engineering has a wide variety of laboratories related to undergraduate teaching, geotechnical, structural, and environmental engineering. Most of these laboratory facilities are housed in the Minto Centre for advanced studies in Engineering. Structural engineering research is housed in the structures laboratory, which has a 11 m x 27 m strong floor with a clear height of 11 m.
 Structures Laboratory at Carleton University |
 Large Reaction Frame Test Setup |
Actuators and Hydraulics
Upgrades to the lab in 2016, as part of the Infrastructure Protection CFI grant included a new hydraulic system and actuators. The upgrades to the hydraulic system included adding an additional XXgpm pump and retrofit of an existing pump to allow for a total of XXgpm of reserve capacity. This will allow for large-scale dynamic testing using multiple actuators.
 Typical Hydraulic Accumulator Bank |
 MTS SilentFlo Pump with 90 gpm Capacity |
In addition to a new hydraulic system, the
 +/-1000 kN (+/-500 mm) Dynamic Actuator |
Two Dyanmics Actuators:
+/-1000 kN (250 kips) +/-500 mm (20 in.) 90 GPM Servo-valve |
Control and Data Acquisition
In addition to new hydraulic equipment, the structures lab has also recently acquired new hydraulic control and data acquisition systems. The hydraulic controller is an MTS FlexTest 100 controller, which has 8 control channels and the ability to accommodate up to 4 test stations simultaneously. The controller has built in real-time hybrid testing capabilities using a shared-memory interface. The data acquisition systems include 4 MTS FlexDAC20 units, which are a high-speed system with a maximum sampling rate of up to 6kHz and 64 channels per unit. For four units, this results in a total of 256 available channels. This equipment will facilitate multiple experiments, sufficient measurement rate, and channel capacity to conduct hybrid simulations.
 MTS FlexTest 100 Controller |
 Two MTS FlexDAQ units |