Study Of Excavator Bionic Bucket Tooth Based On The Badger Claw Toe

In order to solve the problems of high resistance and fracture in excavator bucket tooth,a bionic excavator buckettooth was designed.Bucket tooth is assembled in the bucket tip,which is an important component of excavator,and its performance directly impacts the performance of bucket and even excavator.The bucket tooth is prone to abrasive wear during the operation,which could result in the reduction of cutting capacity.Improvement of bucket tooth configuration is one of the methods to improve the performance of bucket tooth.In this paper the badger was selected as the research object.Badger is a mammal,which is distributed in most parts of Europe and Asia.Badger is good at digging and it is a kind of burrowing animal.Badger owns slender and bending front claws,which are a powerful tool for digging.Therefore,by inspiration of that,the claws could provide a good bionic prototype for the design of bucket tooth.Handheld three-dimensional(3D)scanner(Handyscan700,Canada,Creaform company)was used to obtain the 3D point cloud of badger claw toe.This experiment was carried out in April 15,2015.Due to the darker surface of badger claw toe,the toe had been sprayed with a layer of white power to enhance the results before scanning.The scanning results were imported into the reverse engineering software(Geomagic),and the contour curve of the longitudinal section of the badger claw toe was obtained through a series of processing.Then,the curve equation of the inner surface and the outer surface of the badger claw was obtained by curve fitting.Taking 80 type bucket tooth as a reference,the curve equations were applied to the design of bionic bucket tooth,and the bucket tooth model was established by utilizing the curves.Finite element analysis software(Abaqus)was implemented to analyze the mechanical properties of 80 type bucket tooth and bionic bucket tooth.The material,density,elastic modulus,Poisson ratio,yield strength of bucket tooth model were Mn13,7900 kg/m3,210 GPa,0.3 and 390 MPa respectively.The working face of the 80 type bucket tooth model was applied to a positive pressure,and the pressure value was increased from 1 to 14 MPa.For each simulation,the positive pressure load was increased by 1 MPa.The equivalent stress,strain and deformation of bucket tooth models were analyzed.The result showed that the maximum equivalent stress strain and deformation of the bionic bucket tooth was less than the 80 type bucket tooth in the same case of applying load.The models of bucket tooth wedging soil were established by Abaqus.In order to save computation time,the size of the bucket tooth models was the quarter of reality,which could not affect the results.The depth into earth was 20 mm.The result showed that when the depth was the same,the energy loss of the bionic bucket tooth was 22.7% less than 80 type bucket tooth.The bucket tooth models were imported into 3D printer(ProJet5500X,3D Systems Company,America)for processing.The bucket tooth material was ABS(acrylonitrile-butadiene-styrene copolymer)rubber.In addition,in order to save the material and processing cost,the sample size was 0.6 times of the prototype.This experiment was carried out on December 28,2015.The bucket teeth samples were installed in the Electromechanical Universal Testing Machine and Digging Testbed,and then the buried resistance and troque were tested.This experiment was carried out on October 25,2015.The cutting direction selected was vertically downward,and the cutting speed was 100 cm per minute.Five times repeated trials were implemented,and the average values were attained.The maximum cutting depth was set to 40 mm.The results showed that the wedging resistance of bionic bucket tooth was 11.9%-12.6% lower than the 80 type bucket tooth under the same condition.In addition,the result also showed that when the digging depth was the same,the troque of the bionic bucket tooth was apparently less than 80 type bucket tooth.In this paper,the bionic bucket tooth can provide a reference for designing excavator bucket tooth with better mechanical properties.Further more,it can provide a new idea for the contact soil parts to reduce resistance and has important reference value for design.