Laboratories

The ECCC Laboratories is housed in the building "Center for Energy Resource Management (CERM)", which is located in the UNO Industrial Technology Park on the scenic lake front of Lake Ponchartrain. The ECCC laboratories consist of three groups:

A. Aerothermal Laboratory,

B. Energy Conversion Laboratory,

C. Energy Conservation Laboratory.

ECCC labs are capable of providing measurements and tests in thermal-fluid and power systems including air/steam pressure, flow rates, temperatures, two-phase flow characteristics, flow structures, energy component efficiency, combustion, emissions control, HVAC, and wind tunnel testing. Three wind tunnels are available for providing a wind speed up to 100 mph. The temperature of one wind tunnel can be cooled to 10ºC (50ºF) and heated up to 60ºC (140ºF). The measurement systems include two 3-D automatic traversing systems, a four-channel hot wire anemometer, two 96-channel thermocouple acquisition systems, two 288-channel pressure scanning systems, a laser Doppler anemometer (LDA), a Particle Image Velocimetry (PIV), a Phase Doppler Particle Analyzer (PDPA), and 3-D inverse liquid crystal thermography and infrared thermography.

In addition, resources for conducting scientific computation and simulation are available. The computational fluid dynamics code Fluent and StarCD are used to simulate the details of the fluid flow, heat transfer, combustion, and gasification. GateCycle and THERMOFLOW are employed to design or improve the efficiency of energy systems and power plants. AspenPlus is applied for designing chemical process and energy system simulation. TRANE is used for designing heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC). A cluster of 100-node parallel processors is available for ECCC for CFD and simulation research with access to the High Performance Computing (HPC) system Louisiana Optical Network Infrastructure (LONI) supercomputers.