Infrastructure and services

The Structural Engineering Group

Panoramic view of civil engineering experimental halls
Panoramic view of the civil engineering experimental halls © EPFL

We offer up-to-date equipments in our workshops and exceptional experimental facilities at various scales, including the ability to test large-scale structures in our experimental halls.

GIS website (English only)

The PIXE Platform

Technician placing rock sample on tomography platform.
Technical specialist Gary Perrenoud sets up a sample to be analyzed by the CT system © EPFL

The PIXE platform is designed to perform very high-resolution imaging on natural or engineered materials. It provides researchers and students with non-destructive quantitative data on the internal density contrasts and structures of their studied materials.

This micro CT system currently has no equivalent in Switzerland. Due to its dimensions, spatial resolution, ability to accept various samples geometries, it is specially adapted to the field of engineering.

PIXE website (in English only)

The Platform of Hydraulic Constructions

View of the Hydraulics experimental hall © PL-LCH

Under the leadership of Prof. Paolo Perona, assisted by two senior research associates and one technical director, the PL-LCH staff is composed of about thirty persons. The hydraulic platform benefits from state-of-the-art equipment well suited to fulfilling the three main missions. An area of 500 m2 is specifically allocated to scale model testing.

PL-LCH website

The LESO-PB Building

Exterior of LESO-PB building at EPFL
Face of LESO-PB building

In its early years used to test different façade types, the LESO – Solar energy and building physics laboratory building now allows testing of daylighting and façade control systems.

Other resources of the laboratory include a nanotechnical laboratory, a direct sunlight simulator, a scanning sky simulator, a photobiological laboratory.

Pierre Loesch – Mechanic, LESO-PB Solar energy and building physics laboratory

IT facilities

ACCES provides the knowledge and resources required by EPFL members to learn, develop, implement and optimize the use of computational methodologies as a research and educational tool to resolve complex engineering problems and to communicate their results to the scientific, student and general communities.

ACCES website: Application-Centered Computational Engineering Science

HPC resources provide the scientific community with computational resources for simulation and high / medium performance computing.

ENAC IT HPC website: High Performance Computing et Calcul scientifique (French only)