What can you do if you want to test a dam, railway line, submersible, or a space capsule 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.
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.
CHIEF1900 will allow researchers to compress space and time, recreating catastrophic events such as dam failures and earthquakes inside a laboratory, according to the university.
“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. This replicates the same stress levels the full-scale dam would experience in the real world.”
It’s the largest such centrifuge ever made, housed within the Centrifugal Hypergravity and Interdisciplinary Experiment Facility (CHIEF) in the city of Hangzhou. It is also around 40% more powerful than a similar device housed at a facility of the US Army Corps of Engineers in Vicksburg, Mississippi.
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.”
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.
The implications of CHIEF1900 extend far beyond testing physical structures. The ability to simulate extreme conditions opens doors to discovering new scientific phenomena and theories that were previously impossible to observe. Whether it’s speeding up centuries-long environmental processes or testing futuristic space technology, this groundbreaking centrifuge represents a massive leap forward in experimental science.
