Analytical and Numerical Modeling of Soil Cutting and Transportation During Auger Drilling Operation

Abstract

Abstract Soil drilling operation has become one of the most important interest to researchers due to its many applications in engineering systems. Auger drilling is one of the ideal methods in many applications such as pile foundation engineering, sampling test for geological sciences and space. However, the dominant factor in determination of drilling parameters is real drilling operations experience, which may cause transportation blocking of chips that leads to accidents. As a result, soil drilling process using auger drilling is studied to obtain the controlling parameters and to optimize these parameters to improve drilling performance which enables proper selection of machine for a required job. One of the main challenges that faces researchers during using of modelling techniques to define the soil drilling problem is the complex nonlinear behaviour of the drilled medium itself due to its discontinuity and heterogeneous formation. This paper presents two models that can be used to predict the total resistive forces which affect the auger during soil drilling operation. The first proposed model discusses the problem analytically in a way that depends on empirical data that can be collected from previous experience while the second model discusses the problem numerically with less depending on empirical experienced data. The analytical model is developed using Matlab® interface while the numerical model is developed using discrete element method via EDEM® software. A simplified auger drilling machine is built in the soil-tool interaction laboratory, Military Technical College to obtain experimental results that can be used to verify the presented models. Data acquisition measuring system is established to obtain experimental results using a Labview® program. This program enables displaying and recording the measured data collected mainly from transducers planted in the test rig. Both Analytical and numerical models results are compared to experimental values to aid in developing the presented parametric study that can be used to define the working parameters during drilling operations in different types of soils.