Throughout history, the construction techniques have progressed from the building of pyramids and temples to castles and cathedrals and on to modern cities with glass and steel intelligent buildings and homes. This development has been enabled by the rapid progress in engineering that has involved new building materials, construction processes and transportation methods.
Synchrotron radiation measurements are applied in many different areas in the fields of construction and engineering. The ability of the intense radiation beams to deeply penetrate into materials and measure structural characteristics on the nanometer-range make these techniques ideal for analysis of building materials, for the automotive and aviation industries, and in development of advanced materials for the oil industry.
DESY offers Construction and Engineering companies access to experimental techniques at DESY Photon Science synchrotron facilities applicable to a range of problems including:
• Analysis of stress, fatigue and moisture content in building materials
• Highly dynamic in situ studies of microstructural transformations (e.g. during welding processes or the setting of new cements in
timescales of microseconds
• Testing new alloys for automobile and aircraft components for resistance to stress, fatigue and corrosion
• Investigation of structural properties of new generations of automobile tyres
• Structural analysis of porous materials used in the oil industry for deep sea drilling
• Analysis of electronic, luminescent and structural properties of functional glasses and glass-ceramics
• Elemental analysis and trace-element quantification for a range of materials
