Mining Engineering Commons^™

Percussive Penetration Of Unconsolidated Granular Media In A Laboratory Setting, Leslie S. Gertsch

Geosciences and Geological and Petroleum Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

This controlled study examined the feasibility of a simple percussive approach to drilling through unconsolidated regolith deposits on Mars. The experiments showed that the approach is feasible at the low power levels and low confining pressures used, and that the rate of impact is more important to the penetration rate than is the mass of the impactor (hammer). More massive impactors tend to lower energy efficiency, as they do in terrestrial pile-driving. Unexpectedly, penetration plotted against applied energy tends to cluster into parallel linear trends. Within a given cluster, penetration is very sensitive to applied energy, while between clusters, the …