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american petrographic services

AET > Services > Materials > Petrography

The primary goal of American Engineering Testing is assisting you in solving problems which impact the quality of your construction material projects. We look at the components in your product that determine its quality.

Our expertise allows us to identify the cause(s) of the wide range of problems you may experience, including:

Alkali-silica reaction (ASR)

Alkali carbonate reaction (ACR)

Cracking

Delamination

Low strength

Scaling or spalling

Popouts

Fire damage

AET is capable of providing experienced forensic analysis of the following materials:

Aggregate

Block

Brick

Cement

Concrete

Grout

Mortar

Plaster

Pozzolans

Rock

Underlayments

Fiberglass

Our philosophy at AET is to commit our efforts to three key elements for success:

1. People - both ours and yours

2. Equipment

3. Timeliness

Our staff is a diverse and experienced group that has worked with many different materials and on a wide variety of investigations. We have more than 45 years of combined experience and have performed petrography in over 4,000 projects.

To complement our staff, AET has assembled state-of-the-art equipment to tackle your specific problems. Diagnostic tools include binocular stereo zoom and polarized light microscopes, x-ray diffraction analysis (XRD), and scanning electron microscopy (SEM).

In addition to optical identification, AET can conduct physical and chemical analysis, compressive, tensile, and bond strength testing, rapid chloride ion permeability, water soluble chloride ion content, and accelerated freeze-thaw testing. All told, we can conduct complete physical and chemical analysis of your construction materials.

Our reports include photographic documentation of our investigations. We also can provide video production reporting.

We go the extra step for you in terms of timeliness. Knowing that turnaround can be critical to your project, we can also provide verbal test results in as little as two days on priority investigations.

We provide quality construction material forensics at competitive prices with client-agreed-upon time schedules. Let our versatile and experienced staff be a part of your problem-solving team.

 

Secondary ettringite captured in transition from an amorphous "gel" phase into needle-like crystals. The phase change was observed in a freshly-fractured ettringite-filled microcrack. 500x.

 

 

 

 

Light-colored paste near concrete driveway surface represents carbonation up to ½ inch. The pink phenolphthalein-stained area represents where the high alkalinity of the paste is preserved. 7.5x.

 

 

 

 

Partially-reacted fly ash silica sphere within concrete paste, in thin section, under plane polarized light. 1000x.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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