GEOTECHNICAL CENTRIFUGE INSTRUMENTATION AND MODELLING

Abstract

Centrifuge machines are being used widely worldwide for different purposes including geotechnical testing, Earthquake simulation and testing, Soil Structure Interaction etc. While in our country there isn’t much work being done on the concept of centrifuge machine and there existed a research gap in the working in our country as compared to other countries. To fill this void, we had undertaken this project to develop a custom centrifuge and use it for the geotechnical testing of soil samples. Our project is divided into two phases. First one is the machine development and modelling is mainly the mechanical and electrical component of the project and doesn’t have much to do with the soil testing. While the second phase is related to the soil testing part where we had tested the soil samples to obtain the geotechnical properties of respective soils and have also validated our results and the developed centrifuge by the comparison of results obtained from this centrifuge with those obtained from already existing Triaxial and Direct Shear Testing Machine. In the first phase we have designed our machine and validated it on a software called Solid works and we have also carried out a detailed stability study of our machine, its constituent parts and its foundation to check foe any necessity of a damping system. We have also worked on providing the maximum possible Stability in our apparatus in terms of Vibration control so that our results don’t get affected by these factors. In the second phase we have carried out the soil testing on our centrifuge and we have carried out the testing in three stages i.e. Densification, Saturation, Shearing. At the same time, we have also performed the Triaxial and Direct Shear Test on the same soil samples and at the end we have compared the results from all these three testing machines to validate and verify our machine’s credibility. Identifying the differences in the results obtained from our machine with those obtained from the already existing procedures of Triaxial and Direct Shear Test we have proposed a future working on the machine and certain correction factors related to the machine to achieve maximum accuracy in the results.