The new geotechnical centrifuge facility in the UKCRIC National Infrastructure Laboratory, Southampton

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This paper describes the final commissioning stage and initial operations of the new geotechnical centrifuge facility at the University of Southampton, in the UKCRIC National Infrastructure Laboratory. The new facility is part of a UK-wide investment in university laboratories to support research into infrastructure and cities. The centrifuge is an Actidyn model C67, with a platform radius of 3 metres and a maximum capacity of 130 g-tonnes. The centrifuge facility has been configured to suit a combination of research and teaching usage, with a high utilisation from a wide spectrum of users and use cases. The facility is not within a standalone building but is co-located with a general geomechanics laboratory and other engineering laboratories, alongside student workspaces and staff offices. The machine is supported by ancillary systems for model preparation, for sand and clay samples, and can also run continuously to allow in-flight sample consolidation. A range of control and monitoring systems are mounted onboard, to allow experiments with complex loading histories and other inflight events to be triggered and observed. These experiments include tests in sand and clay samples, with simple and complex patterns of loading, along with image-based deformation measurements.

5th European Conference on Physical Modelling in Geotechnics (ECPMG2024)

New facilities, new equipment, measuring techniques