Our collection of lab facilities for environmental, soil and strength, fluids, and surveying lets you get firsthand experience using research equipment to understand the technical principles you’re learning in class. The Russ College also maintains lab facilities for studying pipes and pavements, which offer students another venue for acquiring technical experience.
Environmental Lab
The Civil Engineering environmental lab gives you hands-on access to both conventional and state-of-art equipment for the study of the physical, chemical, and biological analysis of water and soil. The lab is used extensively for environmental courses where water and wastewater experiments are performed, including coagulation, solids analysis, metals and ion analysis, adsorption, titrations, oxygen demand, and bacterial culturing. Also home to some faculty research, the lab is a testing ground for production of biofuels, treatment of storm flow runoff, use of nano-particles in groundwater remediation, phytoremediation of soil pollutants, treatment of acid mine drainage, arsenic treatment in drinking water, and identification of microbial communities through DNA analysis.
Equipment:
- Atomic adsorption spectrometer
- High performance liquid chromatographer
- Ion chromatographer
- Particle size analyzer
- Scanning spectrophotometer
- Microscopes, autoclave, centrifuges, water baths, and incubators for microbiological analysis
- PCR bench, thermocycler, electrophesis apparatus, transilluminator, and photodocumentation system for DNA analysis
Strength and Soils Lab
The strengths lab is equipped with testing systems for learning principles of strength of materials, observing mechanical behaviors of common engineering materials under various loading conditions, and becoming familiar with modern sensors.
The strengths lab shares space with the soils lab, consisting of universal laboratory equipment for learning and practicing industry-standard soil test methods.
Equipment:
- Tensile strength test system
- Torsion machine
- Digital direct shear test machine
- Unconfined compression machine
- 1-D consolidometer
ORITE Research Facilities
Mobile Civil Infrastructure Lab
Accelerated Pavement Load Facility
Advanced Asphalt Research Laboratory
Lab Safety
The Russ College is dedicated to safe operation of research and academic laboratories. To ensure the safety of faculty, staff, students, and visitors, the responsible instructor/researcher or academic/research unit is required to define operational, hazard identification, and incident response procedures for each laboratory. Ohio University’s Office of Environmental, Health and Safety can provide additional information.
For emergencies, call Ohio University Police Department at 740.593.1911 . Russ College contacts are listed outside of each laboratory.
Russ College Lab and Health Safety Policy
Procedural templates: