The Bert Cooper Engineering Laboratory offers Oklahoma State structural engineering students a world-class home.
Friday, April 24, 2015
With the dedication of many university and industry leaders, the Bert Cooper Laboratory is set to open in April one block north of McElroy on Tyler Road. It is a 33,000 square-foot building that will be used as a structural engineering and materials engineering testing laboratory. The lab has the capacity to test full-size bridges and multi-story buildings. The lab’s strong floor will be four-feet thick and supported by a 20-ton crane named, “Big Russ.” Systems in place to test structures and materials in a real world environment will provide a consistent range of temperatures for testing. This includes a geothermal system that will showcase technology developed in the College of Engineering, Architecture and Technology at Oklahoma State University. The laboratory also features a testing bay dedicated to performing structural engineering and materials research for their responses to fires and other hazardous events.
At nearly $8 million, the building construction used environmentally sustainable methods from concrete foundations to the heating and cooling systems. Faculty and researchers at OSU developed all methods and the lab was one of the first major building projects in the state to use blended cement that contains limestone cement and flyash. Each method reduces the building’s carbon dioxide footprint by 40 percent while 96 percent of the structural steel supplied by W&W Steel is made from recycled materials.
“This project is extremely exciting to us,” said Dr. Gorman Gilbert, former Civil and Environmental Engineering school head, in 2003. “We are committed to having the finest structures engineering program in the nation and not only does this world-class lab help us attain that goal, but it is also the result of a rare partnership between the private sector, the public sector and the university.”
Dr. Gilbert teamed up with OSU Spears’ School of Business alumni and then CEO and board chairman of W&W Steel, Bert Cooper and his son, Rick Cooper, president of the company, to spearhead this endeavor. The laboratory’s namesake, Bert Cooper, died on Feb. 28, 2012, but the plans for the laboratory had been in the works for more than a decade. Mr. Cooper was a longtime supporter of OSU’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. In 2006, Cooper created a $500,000 endowed professorship to benefit the civil engineering department.
The laboratory is all part of a larger strategy laid out by the College of Engineering, Architecture and Technology Dean Paul Tikalsky:
“The Cooper Lab will be home to developing the next generation of structural materials and sensor technology, and we hope to showcase the world-leading geothermal technology developed within our college. The geothermal technology that was developed right here at OSU is now used around the world. We hope that the Bert Cooper Laboratory will provide a working example for energy efficiency and environmental sustainability.”
“Our industry’s forward momentum is dependent upon research and development of new products, and we need a facility in the state where that can occur,” Bert Cooper said. And now Oklahoma State, with the help of many, provides such a facility.
The Bert Cooper Laboratory is a high-tech building with very special features that set Oklahoma State’s Civil and Environmental Engineering school apart from other schools in the nation. Dr. Gilbert and Bert Cooper had the foresight as well as the support of university and industry leaders to create such a unique offering to students and faculty that will lead OSU into the next generation of structural and materials engineering.