Development of a Geotechnical Centrifuge Facility for Research and Education

该仪器项目是在南加州大学（USC）开发一个离心机设施，该离心机使用目前在加州理工学院（Caltech）的离心机。在加州理工学院设备移植到南加州大学期间，离心机将配备新的数据采集和传输系统，并将使用新的图像处理技术来显示和测量位移模式。与大型离心机设施相比，升级后的离心机设施的维护和运行成本适中。它将主要致力于在应用地球科学和工程方面进行创新和基础研究。该离心机设施将向南加州地区的其他大学开放。培训材料和研究成果将以数字格式和视频片段在互联网上传播。该设施将用于研究物理科学中无法用数学建模和完全解释的问题。在许多情况下，分析方法不能对复杂问题给出一个全面而清晰的图景。实验技术经常被用来阐明物理过程的复杂性。由于测试全尺寸结构的成本和难度，利用离心机等设备进行的缩小模型实验已广泛应用于工程中，以提供有关复杂结构行为的信息。这是一项由核磁共振项目支持的设备拨款。

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.