Constructing a single-story laboratory disguised as a 1,610-sq-ft office building—with interchangeable parts and systems for energy conservation performance mock-up tests—is novel but manageable. Constructing that building on a 64-ft-dia turntable, 100 yards from the Hayward Fault in earthquake-prone Berkeley, Calif., is undefined territory. So say members of the team building the world’s first revolving test bed—the centerpiece of the $15.7-million FLEXLAB at the U.S. Dept. of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
The turntable test bed is a rectilinear shed that consists of mirror-image test cells, each measuring 20 x 30 ft. Once per minute, researchers can reset the orientation of the test building. The turntable rotates clockwise 270˚ from the southeast to the northeast to track the sun at its minimum speed of 1.8˚ per minute. It returns to 0˚ rotation by moving counterclockwise at its maximum speed of 18˚ per minute.