Duke University 2008-2009 - Office of the Registrar - Duke University

cultivation of genetically engineered microorganisms, fully instrumented bioreactors with
on-line control, and various analytical instrumentation including liquid scintillation
counting, autoradiography, atomic adsorption spectroscopy, total carbon analysis to ppb
levels, gas chromatographs equipped with ECO, FID, and TCD detectors, HPLCs,
computer-assisted image analysis microscopes, and a recently acquired fourier transfer
infrared spectrometer facility.
Computer resources available to Civil and Environmental Engineering students
include a multitude of personal computers distributed through departmental research
facilities. Additionally, the department houses and maintains its own computing facility,
providing UNIX workstations and IBM-compatible PC’s. This particular facility is
dedicated to graduate student research and special undergraduate projects. Most of the
computer resources are networked with the Pratt School of Engineering’s ethernet
backbone and are easily accessible from several locations in the department and across the
campus. Depending on the specific application, students can successfully investigate
problems in computational fluid and solid mechanics, rigid-body dynamics, particle and
mathematical optimization as well as transportation and environmental systems
engineering research topics. Several BEOWOLF computing clusters are housed in the
department. Many problems addressed by the faculty and students of the Department of
Civil and Environmental Engineering are computationally complex and could not be
approached without the substantial computing facilities available at Duke.
Electrical and Computer Engineering. General computing laboratory equipped with
several IBM RS-6000s servers and a fast interconnect network in a UNIX environment for
interactive design, graphics, computation, and computer-aided engineering; Sun SPARC
workstations for VLSI design; ethernet network for connection to regional, national, and
international data networks; Signal Processing Laboratory with Sun workstations;
microwave facilities for experimentation up to 35 GHz; robotics with a GE P-50 robot;
microprocessor laboratory; Digital Systems Laboratory; solid-state power conditioning
laboratories with dedicated computers for controlling instruments, including digital
processing oscilloscopes and network and impedance analyzers, and for computer-aided
design; clean room and semiconductor nMOS fabrication laboratory for integrated circuits;
a molecular beam epitaxy laboratory for III-V compound semiconductor crystal growth
using a Riber Model 3R&D MBE system; access to the design, fabrication, and research
facilities of the Microelectronics Center of North Carolina; and an ion implanter and
MOCVD epitaxial growth system in a III-V compound semiconductor lab at the Research
Triangle Institute.
Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science. The department has a number of wellequipped
laboratories for studies in aerodynamics, acoustics, nonlinear dynamics and chaos,
microscale and convective heat transfer, computational fluid mechanics and heat transfer,
control theory, cell and membrane biomechanics, biorheology, polymer engineering,
corrosion, electronic materials, physical metallurgy, positron annihilation spectroscopy, and
expert systems. Equipment in these laboratories includes a wind tunnel, several scanning
electron microscopes and scanning tunneling microscopes, doppler broadening and lifetime
positron systems, a liquid helium cryostat, DSC/DMA facilities and diffusion furnace,
inverted microscopes, low-light-level video cameras and a photon counter, cell-culture
systems, an anechoic chamber, dynamic signal analyzers and laser velocimeters for dynamic
analysis, an X-ray generator and diffractometer, FTIR spectrometer, high-power lasers with
lock-in amplifier, and fluorescence microscopes.
The Duke Hypo-Hyperbaric Center is a major center for research, treatment and
training involving hyperbaric and hypobaric exposure and simulation. The facility includes
the F. G. Hall Laboratory, a large multi-chamber complex, and supporting clinical and
laboratory serv ices. Hyperbaric oxygen is used in the treatment of many disorders, including
decompression illness, gas gangrene, carbon monoxide poisoning and wound healing. The
hyperbaric facility is fully equipped with state-of-the-art hemodynamic and blood gas
Resources for Study 316