China has revealed a powerful new “hypergravity machine” capable of generating forces nearly 2,000 times stronger than Earth’s gravity.
The device, known as CHIEF1900, was built at the Centrifugal Hypergravity and Interdisciplinary Experiment Facility at Zhejiang University in eastern China. It allows scientists to study how extreme gravitational forces affect materials, plants, cells, and large structures.
By dramatically compressing space and time, the machine can recreate conditions similar to major disasters such as earthquakes or dam failures. For example, researchers can test the stability of a dam nearly 1,000 feet tall by spinning a 10-foot model at 100 times normal gravity. It can also be used to analyze how rail tracks respond to vibration or how pollutants move through soil over thousands of years.
CHIEF1900 has now surpassed its predecessor, CHIEF1300, which only became the world’s most powerful centrifuge a few months ago. It also overtakes the former record holder in Mississippi, which could generate 1,200 g-tonnes of force.
To reach its extreme performance, CHIEF1900 spins test payloads inside a massive centrifuge similar in concept to those used by air forces to train pilots for high-G conditions — but at vastly higher levels. The machine can produce up to 1,900 g-tonnes of force, far beyond everyday comparisons like a washing machine, which reaches only about two.
Engineers faced major challenges building the system, especially managing the intense heat produced at such speeds. They developed a vacuum-based cooling setup that uses coolant and forced air to keep temperatures under control.
“Our goal is to create experimental environments that range from milliseconds to tens of thousands of years, and from atomic to kilometer scales,” said Chen Yunmin, the project’s chief scientist at Zhejiang University. “This gives us the opportunity to uncover entirely new phenomena and theories.”