Journal Article

On Modeling Drilling Load in Lunar Regolith Simulant

Tang, Jun-Yue, Quan, Qi-Quan, Tang, De-Wei, Chen, Chong-Bin, Deng, Zong-Quan

2018

Overview

Drilling and coring, as effective ways to obtain lunar regolith along the longitudinal direction, are widely applied in the lunar sampling field. Conventionally, modeling of drill-soil interaction was divided into soil cutting and screw conveyance processes, ignoring the differences in soil mechanical properties between them. To improve the modeling accuracy, a hypothesis that divides the drill-soil interaction into four parts: cuttings screw conveyance, cuttings extruding, cuttings bulldozing, and in situ simulant cutting, is proposed to establish a novel model based on the passive earth pressure theory. An iterative numerical calculation method is developed to predict the drilling loads. A drilling and coring testbed is developed to conduct experimental tests. Drilling experiments indicate that the drilling loads calculated by the proposed model match well the experimental results. The proposed research provides the instructions to adopt a suitable drilling strategy to match the rotary and penetrating motions, to increase the safety and reliability of drilling control in lunar sampling missions.

• Publisher: Springer Singapore,Springer Nature B.V,State Key Laboratory of Robotics and System, Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin 150001, China
• Subject: Bulldozers / Coring / Cutting / Drilling / Earth pressure / Electrical Machines and Networks / Electronics and Microelectronics / Engineering / Engineering Thermodynamics / Extrusion / Heat and Mass Transfer / Instrumentation / Iterative methods / Lunar surface / Machines / Manufacturing / Mechanical Engineering / Mechanical properties / Mechanism and Robotics / Model accuracy / Original Article / Passive pressure / Power Electronics / Processes / Regolith / Sampling / Soil mechanics / Soil properties / Soils / Space missions / Theoretical and Applied Mechanics