Derek Dubout

These drawings are basic schematics I've used to show people what our laboratory can do and to give them an idea of how we do it. The drawings were all intended for black and white printing but now that we're going to produce a website, I'm revisiting each one. I'm planning to make a series of GIF animations for most of the tests we conduct. Here's one:

For this simple animation I used WildTools 3D to produce the start and finish points then the Blend Tool to produce intermediated steps. With each of the steps on different layers, I exported each to TIFF format and then used GifBuilder to produce the animation. The following are static schematics we've used for printing. Some of these were originally drawing in ClarisCAD but have been imported and tweaked in PowerCADD.

Large Scale Testing Schematic Facade testing basically involves producing pressure differentials across the facade to simulate the effects of wind pressure and suction. Measurements of displacements are used to determine structural adequacy and water sprayed on the outdoor face in conjunction with a positive pressure differential evaluates resistance to water penetration.

In-situ Testing Schematic These are other forms of testing used to evaluate facade performance.

Mechanical Testing Ian Bennie & Associates also perform mechanical tests on fixing and assemblies primarily associated with the facade industry.

This is a typical mechanical test on an aluminium bracket designed to support a proprietary roller track system for multi-fold sliding doors. Displacement transducers (visible at the centre top of the photo) are used to record the performance of the bracket.

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