Environment & Energy Research

Broadbent centrifuge systems provide a controlled platform for investigating environmental processes where fluid flow, self-weight stress and material behaviour interact.

Hypergravity testing allows reduced-scale models to reproduce representative stress and hydraulic conditions while accelerating processes such as seepage, migration, consolidation and buoyancy-driven flow.

Applications range from carbon capture and geological storage through to contaminant migration, groundwater flow, permeability testing and environmental remediation studies. Systems can incorporate fluid injection, pressure measurement, sampling, tracer techniques, image analysis and other monitoring technologies to follow how fluids and contaminants move through soils and porous materials.

Centrifuge testing can support research associated with carbon capture and storage (CCS), particularly the subsurface storage stage. Controlled physical models can be used to investigate CO₂ injection, plume migration, pressure development, trapping mechanisms, caprock behaviour and potential leakage pathways through faults or other geological features.

This provides experimental data to support the development and validation of numerical models used to assess long-term storage performance.

Hypergravity modelling can be used to study the movement of contaminants through soil, groundwater and layered geological materials. Experiments can investigate advection, dispersion, diffusion and multiphase transport, together with the influence of changing permeability and stratigraphy.

These models can support research into contaminant plume development, containment systems, barrier performance and remediation strategies, with instrumentation allowing migration and pore-pressure response to be monitored throughout the test.

Broadbent systems can also support permeameter flow testing at elevated gravity, allowing researchers to investigate hydraulic conductivity, seepage and fluid transfer through soils and porous media under representative stress conditions.

Typical applications include:

• Permeability and hydraulic conductivity
• Seepage through layered soils
• Groundwater flow
• Pore-pressure development
• Fluid injection and extraction
• Breakthrough and tracer testing
• Barrier and liner performance
• Coupled flow and consolidation
• Soil–fluid interaction

Experimental systems can incorporate pore-pressure sensors, flow measurement, tracer monitoring, fluid sampling, cameras and image-analysis techniques, providing a detailed picture of how environmental processes develop during a test.