Invariance of conveying capacity for drilling into lunar soil simulant

Abstract In this paper, we study the conveying dynamics in the helical groove of an auger drilling into lunar simulant. We demonstrate that the stress-coupling effect of the conveyed granules by the groove of a drill auger plays a significant role on the dynamics of conveyance. For this, a discrete element method (DEM) is adopted first to uncover the motion and the stress characteristics of conveyed granules in a working auger. Then, a simplified dynamic model following the stress characteristics of DEM is established. The simplified model can not only reflect the results by the discrete element method, but can also explain well the proportional relationship between the maximum conveying rate and the rotating speed of the auger in the experiment ( Zhao et al., 2019 ).