FIELD AND LABORATORY WORK IN CIVIL ENGINEERING.
The outfit of Field Instruments contains compasses, transits, and levels
of various approved makes; a solar transit, furnished also with stadia
wires and gradienter for tachymetric work; hand-levels and clinometers
for field topography; plane tables; a sextant; together with an adequate
supply of leveling rods, telemeter rods, signal poles, chains, tapes, pins,
and so on. For hydraulic surveys a hook gauge and a current meter are
provided. All students are instructed in the theory and adjustments of
the field instruments and in their practical use in the field. They are also
required to make up their field-books in standard forms; to reduce their
surveys and execute all the necessary profiles, plans, and maps; and to
determine lengths, areas, and volumes both from the maps and from the
original notes. Polar planimeters are provided for facilitating such estimates
and a pantograph for making reduced copies of finished drawings.
The apparatus for tests of Non-bituminous Road Materials includes a
two-cylinder Deval abrasion machine, a ball mill, a moulding press for
briquettes of rock dust, a Page impact cementation tester, a Page impact
toughness tester, a rock crusher and a Purdue brick rattler. This outfit
the University owes to the generous aid of Dr. Logan Waller Page. In
addition, the Department has acquired a 40,000-pound compression tester,
a diamond core drill, a diamond rock saw, a grinding lap, a Westphal balance,
specific gravity apparatus, and a complete set of sieves. Useful
researches in the road-building rocks and gravels of Virginia, as well as
the standard tests, are conducted each year by the class in Civil Engineering.
Provision has been recently made of apparatus for tests of Bituminous
Road Materials. This includes the New York Testing Laboratory penetrometer,
the Hirschbaum ductility machine, the Engler viscosimeter, the
asphalt viscosimeter, the New York Testing Laboratory extractor, the New
York State Board of Health oil tester, Hubbard pyknometers, asphalt flow
plates, gas and electric hot plates, and all the accessory apparatus needed
for research on bituminous road-binders.
