The Centre conducts research at the cutting edge of the geoenvironmental and geotechnical fields, with a commitment to serve the local and national research needs of industry.
Equipped with a wide range of traditional and state-of-the-art super-computing systems, the GRC’s centrepiece is a newly installed data visualisation suite for stereoscopic projection and for the 3D VR exploration of geoenvironmental problems.
The Centre is also equipped with extensive geotechnical and geoenvironmental experimental laboratory facilities. This includes a 100G large 3m-diameter geotechnical centrifuge for the simulation and modelling of geotechnical structures and processes.
The Geoenvironmental Research Park, or GRP, is a £5M consortium project led by the Centre. The GRP performs large scale R&D, in situ field testing and demonstration projects for Objective 1 environmental SMEs. Its base site is in Port Talbot and it has further satellite sites across Wales.
The Centre is the lead partner in a pan-European infrastructure co-operation network, benefiting from access to a wide variety of European-based facilities and expertise via the GeoEnvNet project. The class of infrastructure covered by the network includes large-scale testing facilities, large-scale computing facilities and centres of competence.
As the founding member of the highly successful all-Wales Land Regeneration Network (LRN), the GRC held workshops, seminars and networking sessions for the delivery and dissemination of valuable industry information. The LRN co-hosted and supported numerous launches and public consultations for environmental stakeholders in Wales.
In addition to high specification PCs the Centre uses the newly procured cluster managed by Advanced Research Computing @ Cardiff (ARCCA), boasting 2048 3.0GHz processing cores and a high-performance interconnect. Facilities also include a distributed computing system that utilises the large quantity of spare CPU time available on desktop PCs around the university.
Experimental equipment includes leaching columns and triaxial permeameters; computer-controlled triaxial testing equipment; graviometric and volumetric pressure plate extractor equipment; and a large scale shear box.
Analytical facilities are also available for solids, liquids and gases, such as X-ray diffraction, X-ray fluorescence, electron microscopy, gas chromatography, ion chromatography, and atomic absorption spectrometry.
