China launches the world’s most powerful super gravity machine

Once fully operational, the Centrifugal Interdisciplinary and Hypergravity Experiment Facility (CHIEF) will provide the science platform with the most powerful hypergravity centrifuge on the planet, MSN reported on November 17. The project marks a step forward in advancing scientists’ understanding of events such as mountain formation and dam collapse disasters. The preliminary completion of the project is a milestone in the field of hypergravity research, according to an announcement by the government of Hangzhou, capital of Zhejiang province in eastern China. According to the plan, the first handover phase will take place this year.

The project was licensed in 2018 by China’s National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC). Construction began in 2020, under the supervision of a team of scientists from Zhejiang University. CHIEF consists of three super-gravity centrifuges, which rotate the chamber extremely quickly so that liquids and heavier solids are pushed to the outer edge or bottom. The first centrifuge looks like two giant arms holding two baskets containing experimental modules. Installation of the remaining two centrifuges is ongoing.

Earth’s gravity is expressed as 1 g, and anything greater than 1 g is called supergravity. When an astronaut returns to Earth in the spacecraft capsule, he or she will experience 4 g of supergravity, equivalent to 4 times their body weight. Supergravity centrifuges are revolutionary research tools because of their ability to create extreme physical conditions that do not exist in everyday environments.

In 2019, Zhejiang University proposed and described CHIEF’s design in detail, according to Chen Yunmin, a professor at the school. Such a facility can “compress” time and space, allowing the investigation of many complex physical problems and serving a diverse range of engineering purposes. For example, scientists can observe the circulation of pollutants lasting tens of thousands of years in nature,” Chen said.

The world’s leading hypergravity facility, developed by the US Army Corps of Engineers, has a capacity of about 1,200 gt (gravity acceleration × tons). The machine under construction in Hangzhou has a total capacity of 1900 gt. The project is designed to house six hypergravity laboratory chambers, each of which will focus on a specific research area such as slope and dam engineering, seismic geotechnical engineering, deep-sea engineering, and environmental engineering. , geological processes and materials processing.

For example, deep-sea technology such as scientific exploration could bring flammable ice closer to reality. Burnt ice is a frozen fossil fuel found on the seabed and permafrost, consisting of water and gas, usually methane. They are abundant, widely distributed energy reserves and provide clean fuel, becoming one of the most promising alternative energy sources in the future. The hypergravity experiment can recreate the mining process and simulate different deep-sea mining methods, allowing for production optimization and risk reduction.

CHIEF is among the 10 important national science and technology infrastructures built in China between 2016 and 2020 at a cost of more than 276.5 million USD.