Study on the Paving Density of Lunar Soil Simulant in the Indoor Ground Test of Lunar Rover

As the basic property of lunar soil simulant, variation of the density will affect the simulant bearing capacity, slope stability, heat exchange property and so on, as well as the mobility of lunar rover. Experiment research reveals that the stacking status has a significant influence on the mechanical property of the lunar soil simulant, and reasonable paving density is critical to the effectiveness of rover mobility experiment on ground. In this paper, the Duncan-Chang–Drucker–Prager model was used for the numerical representation of lunar soil simulant in the finite element model. Based on the analysis of bearing capacity of different lunar soil simulant with different densities, the paving density of lunar soil simulant in the indoor ground test of lunar rover was given.