China is now home to the world’s most powerful centrifuge, capable of creating artificial gravity. This facility will enable a wide range of experiments to help make sense of scientific phenomena, simulate geological events and test new materials.

Located in the eastern Chinese city of Hangzhou, the Centrifugal Hypergravity and Interdisciplinary Experiment Center (CHIEF) houses the world’s largest hypergravity centrifuge. According to the South China Morning Postthe project was Green light in 2018 by the national governmentAnd construction began in 2020 at a cost of around 2 billion yuan ($276.5 million).

Basically, it’s a giant rotating arm in a large room that can carry a payload and spins extremely quickly to create artificial gravity stronger than we normally experience on Earth.

When spinning at high speed in a circle, the movement of the arm creates what is called centrifugal force; it pushes outwards, simulating a gravity that can be several times stronger than Earth’s normal gravity (which we call 1G), i.e. hypergravity. This force helps us replicate the conditions needed to test the strength of materials used in building bridges and spacecraft, the effect of river flood dynamics on dams, and how plants might grow in the ‘space.

By creating hypergravity conditions, CHIEF accelerates physical processes that would normally take much longer under Earth’s gravity. This allows scientists to observe and study phenomena more quickly and efficiently.

Chen Yunmin, professor at Zhejiang University who led the CHIEF projectsaid that with facilities like this, “scientists can observe the transport of pollutants that in nature would take tens of thousands of years.”

Hangzhou Municipal People’s Government

Likewise, you could use a centrifuge like this to observe how dams might perform under years of stress in just a few hours, and safely model dangerous scenarios. This helps engineers design better, safer dams and prepare for possible flooding.

Since they enable these realistic simulations much faster than they would in nature, and with smaller models, these hypergravity centrifuges are said to “compress” time and space. This also makes them useful for research into complex physics problems and engineering challenges.

CHIEF is designed to support a centrifuge capacity of 1,900 gt (gravitational acceleration × ton), and payloads of up to 32 tonnes. This is said to be more than any other installation on the planet, outstripping that of the US Army Corps of Engineers which manages 1,200 GT.

U.S. Army Corps of Engineers – Engineer Research and Development Center

We don’t yet have exact numbers describing the size of CHIEF’s three centrifuges, but they will have to be absolutely enormous to handle this kind of capacity. For reference, the centrifuge at NASA’s Goddard Space Center was the largest in the world about ten years ago, measuring approximately 140 feet (42.6 m) in diameter, with a maximum rotational speed of 156 mph (250 km/h). It is capable of accelerating a 2.5 tonne payload by up to 30g – far less than what the CHIEF can do.

NASA Goddard

With six hypergravity experiment chambers, CHIEF will support six different areas of research:

• Slope and dam engineering
• Seismic geotechnics
• Deep sea engineering
• Deep Earth Engineering
• Geological processes
• Material processing

The main motor of the first centrifuge is turned on and ready to run; the remaining two centrifuges and 10 on-board units for them are still being manufactured. The first phase of commissioning of CHIEF is expected to take place this year.
Source: South China Morning Post