Civil Engineering - Campos, State of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
"The UENF Geotechnical Centrifuge is a Physical Modeling Equipment in Geotechnics, installed on the UENF Campus, capable of testing models of up to one ton in an environment whose gravitational pressure can reach up to one hundred times the Earth's gravity.The UENF Geotechnical Centrifuge has, in operation, about seven meters in diameter and two baskets, which house the containers (models), allowing two simultaneous tests. The purpose of Centrifugation is to subject a reduced scale physical model to a modified gravitational field in order to reproduce the state of tension under which the prototype is subjected in inverse relation to the scale used. During the flight, the centripetal force arising from the acceleration of the centrifuge imposed on the model, generated in the circular motion, is equivalent to the modified gravitational force. The main advantage of using the Centrifuge is the possibility of reconstructing the stresses arising from the gravitational forces under which the prototype will be subjected and the flexibility in modeling extreme cases or phenomena still little known. With this, using the similarity laws, it is possible to reproduce the behavior of the structure or the phenomenon studied in reduced models as if they were in the real dimension of the prototype.