Design and manufacturing of a test rig for measuring the torque required in soil drilling operations

Soil drilling operation has become one of the most important interests to researchers due to its many applications in engineering systems. Such as construction industry, soil samples for geological sciences and space sampling. The dominant factor in determining drilling parameters based on drilling operations experience or in some times based on proposed modelling techniques. As a result, soil drilling process using auger drilling is studied to obtain drilling parameters and then 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 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 a developed apparatus that has been designed and manufactured to be used in measuring and recording the total torque required during soil drilling operation. A simplified auger drilling machine is built in 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 analyse experimental results using a. The Labview® program enables recording and displaying the output data collected mainly from sensors planted in the test rig. Results of both analytical and numerical models are then compared to experimental results 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.