Simulation of Mechanical Behavior of Agglutinates.

摘要

Due to lack of 'real' lunar soil or even lunar simulant, it is difficult to characterize the interaction between lunar soil (or simulant) with different surfaces that are involved in excavation and processing machinery. One unique feature possessed by lunar soil is the agglutinates produced by repeated high-speed micrometeoroid impacts and subsequent pulverization(l and 2). The large particles are impacted by micrometeoroids (Fig.l) and pulverized to produce finer particles. This process continues until there are no more 'large' particles left on the surface of the moon. Due to high impact speed, the impact melting process fuses fines to make agglutinates such as shown in Fig. 2. We will present a series of simulation results and movies will be shown to indicate brittle behavior of each individual agglutinate and also similar compressibility charts shown by Carrier et al. (3). Fig. 3 shows our preliminary result of the simulated oedometer tests.