The World’s Most Cutting-Edge Hypergravity Facility Goes into Operations
Located in the eastern Chinese city of Hangzhou, the Centrifugal Hypergravity and Interdisciplinary Experiment Facility (CHIEF) houses the world’s largest hypergravity centrifuge with the ability to create artificial gravity. According to the South China Morning Post, the project construction began in 2020 at a cost of about 2 billion yuan (US$276.5 million).
In basic words, it is a giant spinning arm put in a large room that can carry a payload and spins extremely fast to create artificial gravity stronger than what the Earth does.
When spinning at a high speed in a circle, the arm’s motion creates what’s called a centrifugal force. It is able to simulate gravity that can be many times stronger than the Earth’s normal gravity, known as hypergravity.
This force helps to create simulated conditions for testing the strength of materials for building bridges and spacecraft, the effect of rivers’ flood dynamics on dams, and how plants might grow in space. By creating hypergravity conditions, researchers can speed up physical processes that would normally take much longer under Earth’s gravity, allowing them to observe and study phenomena more quickly and efficiently.
According to Chen Yunmin, a professor at Zhejiang University who led the CHIEF project, a centrifuge like this can be used to observe how dams might function over years of stress in a few hours, and model dangerous scenarios safely.
Therefore, this helps engineers design better, safer dams and prepare for potential flood events. In addition, these hypergravity centrifuges allow these realistic simulations much faster than they’d occur in nature, making them useful for research into complex physics problems and engineering challenges.
CHIEF is designed to support a centrifuge capacity of 1,900 g-t (gravity acceleration × ton), and payloads of up to 32 tons which are said to be more than other facilities on the planet. CHIEF consists of six hypergravity experiment chambers, promising to support six different areas of focus for research, including slope and dam engineering, deep-sea engineering, deep-earth engineering, geological processes, materials processing, and seismic geotechnics.
South China Morning Post informed that the main engine of the first centrifuge is fired up and ready to go while the remaining two centrifuges and 10 on-board units for them are still being fabricated.
It’s expected that CHIEF’s first phase of commissioning will take place this year.
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