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urethane combined with plywood,” Hamel says. “Alaska Insulated Panels prefers that construction because in the really wet areas of villages, they’ve found that, using OSB, it just kinds of turns to mush.” Using plywood to improve the durability of the product actually makes the panels stronger, but plywood is more expensive than OSB. “They would like to be able to use the increased strength [further justifying additional cost], but nobody knows what that strength is.” Hence Alaska’s new, shiny, strong-floor lab comes into play. Hamel says that Alaska Insulated Panels contacted him at the urging of a company engineer. “There wasn’t really anywhere they knew of to turn, so they contacted the college and ended up with me… I put them off for a year; I said we’re building a facility that will make this a lot easier and cheaper. We have some other facilities that could have sort of done it, but it would’ve taken a lot more time and cost a lot more.” The August test on the panels was to bend them. Other tests include what kind of pressure the panel can withstand from end to end and standing two panels together and pushing on the side to see what it takes to topple them over, a sort of simulation of how they would perform in an earthquake. Finding the limit of the panel means knowing at what point it fails, so the tests can result in what’s known as “catastrophic failure;” in the bending test, the panel snapped nearly in half. Fortunately, while unsuitable for building a home, even a snapped in half panel doesn’t necessarily need to go to waste. “Our machinist wanted to take [the pieces] to build a doghouse. He has the only R40 doghouse in the city, probably,” Hamel laughs.
Potential Projects through Spring 2016 Metzger says a potential upcoming project for the lab is particularly interesting to him, as he hasn’t run across a similar test throughout his career. Essentially, it’s testing to see how prone a certain coating is in terms of causing bolted steel connections to slip. “You have to apply a load for a thousand hours; that’s almost forty-two days,” Metzger says. “We’re going to hang a weight of about 4,000 pounds on a lever that creates about 35,000 pounds of force and let it sit there, monitoring it the entire time.” As of press time, potential jobs were lined up in the lab through April, and that schedule could easily have been extended. This, too, is a testament of Alaska demand for these types of services, especially considering that the lab was originally planned to be used for undergraduate instruction, and hasn’t been extensively marketed to Alaska industry. Students can design a beam or wall
Alaska Business Monthly | February 2016 www.akbizmag.com