About The NGCF

About us

Overview & Mission of the NGCF

Over the last three decades, the centrifuge facilities at UWA have been instrumental in advancing our understanding of a wide range of offshore soil-structure interaction and soil behaviour problems and have contributed significantly to offshore geotechnical design, globally.

The NGCF was established in 2016 to continue this success story, and to create a foothold for centrifuge modelling, addressing the next generation of challenges facing offshore geotechnical engineering.

The mission of the NGCF is to:

Serve the academic and industry geotechnical engineering communities nationally and worldwide,
Support research and advance knowledge in soil behaviour and foundation engineering,
Develop and provide solutions for geotechnical design,
Assist in training the next generation of geotechnical engineers.

Meet the team

A comprehensive technical team supporting world class academics

The NGCF fuses academic expertise in offshore geotechnics with technical expertise in experimental design, instrumentation, data acqusition and motion control. This team brings unparalleled experience and expertise in developing tailored physical modelling solutions for a wide range of offshore geotechnical problems, including:

developing improved approaches to characterise the seabed,
investigating soil-structure interaction during foundation installation,
understanding the long-term cyclic response of foundations, and
validating new foundation concepts.

We apply this expertise to tackle the most pressing geotechnical issues in offshore engineering.

Our experts

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Our World Leading Centrifuges

Centrifuges spin reduced-scale geotechnical models to high acceleration levels to replicate the same profile of stress with depth in the spinning soil sample as in the field, hence achieving similitude between model and field conditions.

As geotechnical behaviour is strongly stress dependent, this is an important condition to get correct, so meaningful observations and measurements can be made on the centrifuge model. Scaling laws are then used to interpret the centrifuge model results at field scale, so the centrifuge results can be used as an input in geotechnical design or to demonstrate geotechnical behaviour and mechanisms that can then be reflected in analytical or numerical approaches.

The NGCF hosts three geotechnical centrifuges; two fixed beam centrifuges and a drum centrifuge, providing the capacity and breadth of functionality for our large cohort of academic and industry users.