The city government of Hangzhou in eastern China has switched on the first centrifuge at the world’s most powerful gravity simulation machine, South China Morning Post reports.
Known as “Chief” – short for “Centrifugal Hypergravity and Interdisciplinaryen Experiment Facility” – the $290m facility can create conditions equal to thousands of times the force of gravity on the Earth’s surface.
When fully built, it will have six hypergravity chambers, each of which will focus on a particular area of research: slope and dam engineering, seismic geotechnics, deep-sea engineering, deep-earth engineering and environment, geological processes and materials processing.
An area of particular interest is deep sea mining, especially of the natural gas hydrates that could in future offer an abundant form of energy.
Chief was built as part of China’s 13th Five-Year Plan (2016-20). Work on it was approved by the National Development and Reform Commission in 2018 and began in February 2020.
The world’s leading hypergravity facility was developed by the US Army Corps of Engineers and has a capacity of about 1200 g-t (gravity acceleration × tonne). The one under construction in Hangzhou will have a total capacity of 1900 g-t.
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