Engineering Research Equipment Grants: Refurbishment of a Surplus Centrifuge for Geotechnical Use

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This action is to support the refurbishing and the conversion to geotechnical use of a government surplus centrifuge that has been obtained by the Civil Engineering Department at Texas A&M University. (Geotechnical centrifuges are used for experimentation and testing of soil and rock). Laboratory space has been dedicated to the installation of this facility, with space for sample preparation and data collection and reduction. Geotechnical testing in a centrifuge is second only to full scale testing for research, and as a means of verifying theories and design calculations. It is particularly useful in civil engineering, for which full scale experimentation is usually prohibitively expensive. This facility at Texas A&M University provides an important contribution to the infrastructure needed to utilize the exceptional capability for geotechnical centrifuge research and testing that is now becoming available in the United States; especially with the large geotechnical centrifuges coming on line at the University of California at Davis, the University of Colorado at Boulder, and at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.