OUR AMA ZING FACILITIES
Queen’s Rock Mechanics Renos support better student learning, commercial
Students enjoy the hands-on learning environment of the Rock Mechanics Lab.
“
W
e brought the Rock Mechanics Lab back to life,” says Oscar Rielo, Senior Program Coordinator at the Robert M. Buchan Department of Mining, who led the transformation of two dark, dusty, inefficient spaces into state-of-the-art student learning facilities.
Now, just over a year later, students are hard at work in the orderly second-floor Rock Mechanics Lab and basement lab in Goodwin Hall. “Students remember what they’re taught more easily, and I relate that back to the renovations,” Rielo says. “Before, the chaos and noise of our labs was distracting for them.” Upgrades include two arrays of computers with customized software, which make it easy for learners to monitor results even as they watch their rocks being tested. And more students can work in the once-cluttered labs. “In my Mine 202 course, ‘Instrumentation,’ we can fit 35 students in the second-floor
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THE COMPLETE ENGINEER
lab, versus only 10 before,” Rielo says. “So we get a lot more done.” Two new workstations enable students to build sensors, for example, and test them, with oscilloscopes, voltmeters, soldering irons and
“
The new machine, he adds,
“fits with our commercial strategy to become a onestop
shop for rock testing.”
materials close at hand. New benches and technology, such as computers, data acquisition systems and a force transducer for compressing rock, were introduced. Funding included $40,000 from the departmental budget, plus a good part of a $300,000 investment from the Faculty of Engineering and Applied Science. Today, everything runs smoothly, so lab time is optimized and it’s easier to stage experiments. But the rock lab’s makeover was no easy task. “First, we cleaned up about three tons of garbage,” Rielo recalls. Then, labs were painted, reorganized and upgraded, with much
