Geotechnical Engineering Academic Research
St. John’s Centrifuge Centre, C-CORE
This national facility specializes in reduced scale physical modeling for geotechnical engineers. Canadian academics have support to use the facility through an existing NSERC Major Facility Access grant (MFA).
This MFA provides assistance for C-CORE's technical and research staff to support the users with experiments and maintenance for operation of the facility, including direct costs such as materials, supplies and small equipment. The user’s responsibilities include their own travel and subsistence, and any consumables, new developments, dedicated equipment and dedicated instrumentation associated with their model testing.
Existing instrumentation and equipment are normally freely available to such users. This instrumentation and equipment includes electronic transducers, data acquisition systems, model containments, model preparation equipment, support systems and actuators, including an earthquake simulator. The MFA ensures that 30% of the centrifuge time will continue to be made available to academic researchers at very low cost. There are over 100 other such facilities worldwide and three other such facilities in Canada. These latter facilities are much smaller than that available in St John’s.
The benefit of centrifuge model testing is the simulation of self-weight stresses. Soil behaviour is governed by effective stresses, a principal component of which may be induced by the materials own self-weight. For example, testing a 1/10th scale model in a 10g acceleration field can simulate these self-weight stresses. ISSMGE TC2 provides an introduction and examples of this testing technique.
The C-CORE facility has already been used to investigate a wide range of geotechnical issues ranging from sedimentary rock to sea-ice, from pipelines to ring foundations and from flow liquefaction to oil sand production.
For further information please contact:
Dr. Arash Zakeri - Geotechnical Director
C-CORE
Captain Robert A. Bartlett Building
Morrissey Road
St John’s, Newfoundland, A1B 3X5
Tel: 709 737 4313Fax: 709 737 4706
E-mail: info@c-core.ca
