Universal Panel Tester (UPT)

The Tester is located in the Structural Research Laboratory at University of Houston. It can perform biaxial or triaxial tests on full-size panels with a maximum edge size of 55 inches and a thickness up to 16 inches. The test panels can represent elements from large-scale structures, such as shear walls, beams, girders, shell structures, nuclear containment vessels, and concrete offshore platforms.

The jacks are controlled individually by a servo-controlled hydraulic system consisting of a 5,000-psi pump, a control board with 60 four-way valves, 0.7 km of hardline steel tubes and high-pressure hoses, and a servo-control system. The servo-control system enables panel testing in either load-control or strain-control modes and has the capability of switching from one mode to another in real time.

The facility is the only one of its kind in the United States in terms of the stress states that it can generate in full-scale test panels. It can apply compression, tension, shear, bending, and torsion loads as well as any of their combinations. The Universal Element Tester consists of thirty-seven in-plane jacks and seventeen out-of-plane jacks. It includes three in-plane rigid links that serve as in-plane reaction supports and three out-of-plane rigid links that are used to maintain equilibrium in a three-dimensional space.