What can you do if you want to test a dam, railway line, submersible, or a space capsule’s resistance to gravitational force without risking the destruction of it in the process?
Well now, you can take a scale model to Zhejiang University in China, where the CHIEF1900 gravitational centrifuge can batter it with 300 times Earth’s gravity.
It’s the largest such centrifuge ever made, housed within the Centrifugal Hypergravity and Interdisciplinary Experiment Facility (CHIEF) in the city of Hangzhou. Here used to be found the previously largest centrifuge, which the 1900 will replace.
It’s also around 40% more powerful than a similar device housed at a facility of the US Army Corps of Engineers in Vicksburg, Mississippi.
The device is capable of spinning an object weighing up to 20 metric tons at speeds that will generate around 100g of force. For reference, a home washing machine generates around 2g during its spin cycle.
With this extreme exposure to force, scientists and engineers can test all manner of objects and structures to see how they hold up against extreme force.
“For example, to assess the structural stability of a dam 300 meters (984 feet) tall, scientists can build a three-meter model and spin it at 100g,” writes South China Morning Post’s Jing Lin. “This replicates the same stress levels the full-scale dam would experience in the real world.”
It follows that anything which must resist massive force, such as the objects mentioned above—or anything else for that matter—could be tested by CHIEF1900. Lin explains that other, centuries-long processes can be tested in days, such as how environmental pollutants leach through soil.
But the device’s implications and potential go even farther beyond these valuable practicality.
“We aim to create experimental environments that span milliseconds to tens of thousands of years, and atomic to [kilometer] scales—under normal or extreme conditions of temperature and pressure,” said Chen Yunmin, CHIEF’s chief scientist and a professor at Zhejiang University. “It gives us the chance to discover entirely new phenomena or theories.”
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Its construction involved a large, multidisciplinary team often operating without any precursor blueprints, to build the most powerful device of its kind—more or less from scratch.
As such, CHIEF promotes international collaboration. The facility is open to users from universities, research institutes and industries, both domestic and overseas.
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