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Facilities

Overview

The NTM laboratory is located in Boise State’s Micron Engineering Center (MEC 314) and includes a wet lab (800 ft2) and a computing lab (150 ft2).  The MEC is home to several laboratories conducting research in mechanical, biomedical, materials science, and nanotechnology. The NTM lab is equipped for research projects in experimental and computational tissue mechanics, and has been designed to promote an efficient, productive, and enjoyable work environment.

Wet Lab

The wet lab is equipped for mechanical testing, dissection, imaging, and data analysis. To facilitate mechanical testing, the laboratory houses an Instron E10000 Electropulse biaxial test system, a custom biaxial test system, and a hip simulator to measure wear in hip prosthesis.  Multiple load sensors permit sensitive tests that range from small tissue samples to large musculoskeletal structures. Imaging equipment includes a 3D optical scanner, a high-speed camera, and a quantitative polarized light imaging system. A workbench is equipped with a 3D printer, tools, hardware, materials and electronics to develop and build test fixtures, device prototypes and mechatronic systems.  The lab has desk space for eight people and four iMac computers. A tissue/cell culture facility is adjacent to the NTM wet lab, and is equipped with incubators, microscopes and bioreactors for in-vitro mechanical stimulation.

Lab montage

Computing Lab

The computing lab is located across the hall from the wet lab and houses computational resources to perform numerical modeling, molecular dynamics simulations, and computer-aided design. The computers include a quad-core Asus, with Windows and Linux dual-boot. Large numerical problems are run on a high performance computing cluster housing 16 nodes each with 16 cores. This cluster is capable of GPU parallel computing (BSU is one of twenty CUDA Research Centers in the world). Finite element software includes LS-DYNA, LS-DYNA PrePost, FEBio, and MOOSE. Fluid dynamics software includes OpenFOAM; Molecular dynamics software includes vmd, Amber-11, Charmm, Gromacs, and Namd; and computer-aided design is done on Solidworks.