To study extreme phenomena, scientists need some extreme equipment. In its second engineering breakthrough within the week, China has unveiled the world’s largest centrifuge—a device using centrifugal force to separate substances—and it’s just the first of even more powerful machines planned for construction.
On September 29, Chinese media announced that the Centrifugal Hypergravity and Interdisciplinary Experiment Facility (CHIEF) had launched CHIEF1300, one of three centrifuges planned for the facility, China’s ambitious blueprint for an international research hub to study hypergravity. CHIEF1300 generates accelerations that are 300 times more powerful than Earth’s gravity and can carry up to 20 metric tons of loads.
What’s surprising is that, if everything proceeds as planned, the two incoming centrifuges will be even more powerful than CHIEF1300. Overall, researchers expect the facility to sustain accelerations up to 1,500Gs. The breakthrough is expected to support research across various fields, including deep-Earth resource extraction, disaster mitigation, underground waste disposal, and the synthesis of new materials.
Reaching hypergravity
Strictly speaking, hypergravity refers to any gravitational force stronger than that of Earth’s surface. Centrifuges have been around since at least the 18th century, and they were famously used to test the limits of pilots and astronauts as early as the late 1940s.
But more scientists are turning to centrifuges to freely “control” gravity levels, an effective way to “tease out the secrets of the inner workings of physics and nature,” according to the European Space Agency. At completion, the Chinese facility will have three centrifuges and 18 in-flight devices with six experimental cabins for studying hypergravity. CHIEF’s impressive scale and capacity are also expected to contribute to China’s fast-growing spaceflight ventures.
“In a hypergravity field, researchers can simulate real-world hydrogeological catastrophes, geological evolution, and extreme environments in bench-top scale models within a reasonable timeframe,” Chen Yunmin, CHIEF’s chief scientist, told Xinhua News.
An underground gravity flex
CHIEF1300 has a giant arm about 21 feet (6.4 meters) in length and sits inside a circular basement under the facility. The machine hall was specially engineered to minimize air resistance and machine heating, Ling Daosheng, an engineer at Zhejiang University, explained to Xinhua News.
To test the machine, the researchers had it simulate a number of different extreme environments. For example, in one experiment, they reproduced strong earthquakes and tsunamis to see if the data could be useful for identifying the best locations for offshore wind farms. Another test run sought to investigate how deep-sea pressure could influence methane extraction operations.
Although the experiments are still in their early stages, Chen said the team is confident the facility can help drive scientific progress around the world. For instance, extreme conditions that would take a century to unfold in real life could be replicated by a completed CHIEF in a matter of days, the researchers said. Chen added that he’s looking “forward to teaming up with the world’s top research groups to accelerate discovery and spark innovation.”