China has unveiled an extremely powerful “hypergravity machine” capable of generating forces nearly two thousand times greater than Earth’s normal gravity.
The futuristic-looking machine, called CHIEF1900, was built at the Center for Centrifugal and Interdisciplinary Hypergravity Experiment (CHIEF) at Zheijang University in eastern China, and allows researchers to study how extreme forces affect various materials, plants, cells or other structures, such as South China Morning Post reports.
It can effectively compress space and time, allowing researchers to recreate conditions during catastrophic events, from dam failures to earthquakes. For example, it can analyze the structural stability of a nearly 1,000-foot-tall dam by rotating a ten-foot model at 100 Gs, or 100 times Earth’s normal gravity.
It could also be used to study the resonant frequencies of high-speed railways or how pollutants seep into the ground over thousands of years.
China launches world’s most powerful centrifuge, unleashing ultra-intense gravity
The machine has officially dethroned its predecessor, the CHIEF1300, which just four months ago became the most powerful centrifuge in the world.
The previous record holder was the Army Corps of Engineers centrifuge in Vicksburg, Miss., which can generate 1,200 g-tons, a measurement that combines gravitational acceleration (G) and mass measured in tons (2,200 pounds) of force.
To generate these forces, CHIEF1900 spins a payload inside a powerful centrifuge, much like those used by the US Air Force to simulate high G-forces during pilot training.
Except the forces are orders of magnitude stronger. It can generate 1,900 g-tons of force, or 1,900 times Earth’s gravity. To put that into perspective, a washing machine only reaches about two g-tons.
Engineers had to overcome significant challenges to bring the CHIEF1900 to this powerful strength. On the one hand, spinning at such high speeds generates an enormous amount of heat. To dispel all this, engineers developed a vacuum-based temperature control system, such as SCMP reports, which uses coolant and forced-air ventilation to keep things cool enough.
“We aim to create experimental environments that span milliseconds to tens of thousands of years, and at atomic scales down to kilometers – under normal or extreme conditions of temperature and pressure,” said Chen Yunmin, professor at Zhejiang University and chief scientist of CHIEF. SCMP.
“This gives us the chance to discover entirely new phenomena or theories,” he added.
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