Development of a Geotechnical Centrifuge Facility for Research and Education

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This instrumentation project is to develop a centrifuge facility at the University of Southern California (USC) which uses the centrifuge currently at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). During the transplantation of the Caltech facility to USC, the centrifuge will be equipped with new data acquisition and transmission systems, and will use new image-processing techniques to display and measure displacement patterns. Compared to larger centrifuge facilities, the upgraded centrifuge facility will have a moderate maintenance and running cost. It will be devoted mainly to conducting innovative and fundamental research in applied geosciences and engineering. The centrifuge facility will be made accessible to other universities in the Southern California area. Training materials and research results will be disseminated in digital format and video clips on the Internet.The facility will be used to study problems in physical sciences that cannot be modeled mathematically and explained completely. In many cases, analytical methods fail to yield a through and clear picture of complex problems. Experimental techniques have been regularly employed to elucidate the complexity of physical processes. Experiments on reduced-scale models using facility such as centrifuge have been extensively used in engineering to give information on the behavior of complex structures because of the expense and difficulty of testing the full-size structures.This is an equipment grant supported under MRI program.