Development of Platform for Active Filling Lunar Soil Simulants

Abstract

Aiming at the problem of lunar soil utilization and low test efficiency for the lunar surface integrated drilling test rig，a design scheme of the active soil feeding test rig is proposed to meet the special verification requirements of the coring characteristics of lunar drilling and mining equipment. The shaftless spiral is utilized as the core component of the simulated lunar soil transportation，and the integrated hopper is adopted to realize the continuous feeding of the difficult-to-flow material. The shaft-free spiral rotation is used to actively send the simulated lunar soil vertically into the coring mechanism instead of the integrated drilling test bench. By drilling the lunar soil，it is possible to realize quantitative and constant pressure transport of various grading simulations of lunar soil. In order to verify the correctness of the design parameters，EDEM discrete element analysis is used to simulate the characteristics of lunar soil transport，and experimental verification is carried out. The results show that the shaftless spiral can be used as the core unit of the active soil feeding mechanism，and the active soil feeding test bench can be used to simulate the lunar soil transport simulation of various coring conditions independently，and develop the drilling equipment for the engineering department.

Keywords

lunar sampling / lunar soil simulants / ground-based validation / active transport / shaft less screw