Optimization of percussive mechanism in rotary-percussion drill for lunar exploration

Rotary-percussive Drill (RPD) has been widely employed in extraterrestrial exploration as a main drilling and sampling device. Percussive mechanism, as an inevitable part of RPD, is commonly utilized to exert percussion onto drill stem to improve drilling performance once hard rock is encountered. However, since driving resource provided by the probe is limited in lunar exploration, outputs of percussive mechanism-impact energy and percussive frequency-which are restricted by system power affect the drilling efficiency greatly. In order to maximize the percussive performance under a limited power resource, this paper presents a kind of feasible optimization approach aiming at optimizing the design parameter matches of percussive mechanism. The optimized result is compared with a group of randomly-selected parameters match to emphasize the advantage of optimization. Experiments are conducted on a Drilling and Coring Test-bed (DCTB) to verify the optimized result.