As we are determined to maintain our standing as “The Concrete Specialists,” Thomas Concrete will be constructing a new Concrete Laboratory. This new laboratory will be located at our Doraville, Georgia plant site. We will be replacing the facility that is currently located at our Atlanta plant site.
The new lab will have 4800 square feet of interior space that will include:
- A large training room for seminars, meetings and for conducting ACI examinations.
- Offices for Kenny Strickland, the Lab Manager and some of the Technical Services staff, including Joanna Moak, our Administrative Assistant and Don Blair, our Field Director of Technical Services.
- A large moisture and temperature controlled curing room for storage of specimens.
- A Hot/Cold room for testing materials under extreme conditions or preparing for different seasons.
- A 600,000 lb load rated compressive testing machine.
- Fine and Coarse aggregate testing equipment.
- A large open area for producing laboratory trial batches in our lab mixer.
- A concrete saw to prepare ends of high strength specimens, or other specimen needing trimmed.
There will also be outside storage areas for aggregates to use as controlled materials for lab mixes.
This Lab will support and compliment the currently existing Thomas Laboratories in Anderson, SC, Charlotte and Raleigh, NC.
Our Laboratories serve as a resource to the industry by providing an area to conduct training as well as to conduct both physical and written parts of the ACI exam.
We utilize our Labs to:
- Verify performances of all of our plants.
- Verify Characteristics of incoming materials.
- Test available products to make sure we are using the appropriate ones.
- Testing new products to keep technology at the fore front.
- Perform lab verifications of different families of mixes for submittal purposes.
- Testing various combinations of materials to optimize performance.
- Compare materials for consistency and performance trends.
- Provide companion testing to evaluate commercial testing lab performance.