Introduction into the basic and practical knowledge of important building materials and testing methods.
Objective
Introduction into the basic and practical knowledge of important building materials and testing methods.
Content
o Introduction of material testing equipment, with various examples of experiments on metals (tensile behaviour, hardness, bending and impact loading). o Theoretical background and practical aspects of concrete technology: mixture design, casting and setting; determination of mechanical properties. o Properties of bricks and mortar: individual materials and the composite brickwork. Parameters like strength, Young’s modulus, water absorption and thermal conductivity are determined. o Understanding the characteristic properties of wood: anisotropy, hygroscopic behaviour, shrinkage and swelling, and effect of size on strength. Introduction to test-methods for wood and wood-products. o Introduction into the basics of scanning electron microscopy: practical exercises with the Environmental Scanning Electron Microscope (ESEM). o Introduction to fundamentals of Finite Element Methods and their application in examples. o Introduction to durability of building materials and building structures: assessment of potentials for detecting and locating corrosion of steel reinforcement in concrete.
Performance assessment as a semester course