The U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center (ERDC) announced that the Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory (CRREL) was awarded an Unspecified Minor Military Construction Authority contract to build a Climatic Chamber Facility on the Hanover, New Hampshire, campus.
The Climatic Chamber Facility consists of a series of modular environmentally controlled chambers to support full-scale testing of military and civil works equipment and systems for use in extreme weather conditions. To meet current and emerging Department of Defense and National Science and Technology needs, CRREL is replacing a smaller 990-square-foot facility with the larger modular test-and-evaluation space, which includes rooms capable of not only maintaining a minus 50 C environment, but also simulating wind and precipitation events.
The CRREL Campus Manager Terry Harwood says there are two basic parts to the climatic chamber: the first part is comprised of two heat exchangers; the second part is the computer that runs the heat exchangers.
The first heat exchanger removes the heat from the chamber and the other dumps it to the outside, said Harwood. This is very similar to a refrigerator in your house. A compressible fluid is used to do this called a refrigerant.
The construction of the facility is scheduled to begin in November 2020, with anticipated completion in December 2021.