American Petrographic Services Inc.

APS > Services

The primary goal of American Petrographic Services (APS) is assisting you in solving problems which impact the quality of your construction material projects. We look at the components of 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

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

aggregate
block
brick
cement
concrete
grout
mortar
plaster
pozzolans
rock/stone
underlayments
fiberglass

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

people -- both ours and yours
equipment
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 6,000 projects.

To complement our staff, APS 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, APS, in association with our sister company American Engineering Testing, Inc. (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. In summary, APS 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.

Reactive shale coarse aggregate has produced a large protrusion in an epoxy coating over an aircraft hanger slab on grade.

Gatonation(unstained) proceeds to significant depth from top surface of scaling exterior concrete framework