Extra Terrestrial Drilling: Numerical Analysis Of A Bio-inspired Solution

With the global-wide newly arisen focus of lunar exploration, more and more attention has beenattached to the investigation of new exploring skills and instruments. In this background, ESA haslaunched one research project for a kind of new innovative extra-terrestrial drilling device, which isinspired by the ovipositional process of a certain kind of wood wasp. This article is consistent to thisresearch orientation, aims at building the numerical material model for regolith, lays the fundamentalbasis afterwards and supplies a research technique for drilling device design. During the process ofregolith model evolution and drilling simulation, this article chose to do the numerical research inLS-DYNA with smoothed particle hydrodynamics method, accompanied by the corresponding controlexperiments. To ensure an advancing expansion of the research as well as relieve the difficulty, theconcrete work begun with the numerical construction of sand material model, after determine thebasic parameters of sand model as well as verify the feasibility and stability of the SPH simulation ofnonlinear phenomenon involving with giant deformation and big displacement, the research wentdeeper to the regolith model evaluation and obtain the essential parameters settlements in a similarway. Finally, with the material model settlements achieved, this article managed to do the elementarynumerical simulation of the whole drilling process. To sum up, the article performed the first-handednumerical drilling simulation with SPH, providing the researchers interested with large amount ofinstances and reference methods and data.