Deriving and verifying a general granular locomotion scaling law

Thesis: S.B., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Mechanical Engineering, 2018.

Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Townsend, Stephen (Stephen C.)
Other Authors: Ken Kamrin.
Format: Thesis
Language:eng
Published: Massachusetts Institute of Technology 2019
Subjects:
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/119936
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author Townsend, Stephen (Stephen C.)
author2 Ken Kamrin.
author_facet Ken Kamrin.
Townsend, Stephen (Stephen C.)
author_sort Townsend, Stephen (Stephen C.)
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description Thesis: S.B., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Mechanical Engineering, 2018.
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spelling mit-1721.1/1199362019-04-11T11:11:32Z Deriving and verifying a general granular locomotion scaling law Townsend, Stephen (Stephen C.) Ken Kamrin. Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Mechanical Engineering. Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Mechanical Engineering. Mechanical Engineering. Thesis: S.B., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Mechanical Engineering, 2018. Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. Includes bibliographical references (page 59). The complexities of granular materials make modeling the interactions between grains and solid intruders, such as a wheel, incredible difficult. Often, modeling these interactions requires discrete particle simulation methods, such as the Discrete Element Method (DEM), a process that is prohibitively computationally intensive for large systems. The difficulty of modeling granular materials has posed great difficulty for design engineers, particularly those interested in granular locomotion, since there is no way to gain predictive insight into the performance of a given granular locomotion system. A granular locomotion scaling law was developed, which instructs how to scale size, mass, and driving parameters in order to relate dynamic behaviors of different locomotors in the same granular media. For the development of this scaling relationship, a general wheel operating in an ideal Coulombic material was considered. Through dimensional analysis, the system was described as a function of a set of dimensionless numbers which are ratios of the dimensional parameters of the system. From the dimensionless description of the system, a set of scaling families are derived, where each member of a family has the same dimensionless inputs but different dimensional parameters. Then, DEM simulations were used to verify that each member of a given scaling family had the same dimensionless outputs. The DEM simulations found a high level of agreement between the dimensionless outputs of systems in the same scaling family, demonstrating the predictive power of the granular locomotion scaling law. by Stephen Townsend. S.B. 2019-01-11T16:03:46Z 2019-01-11T16:03:46Z 2018 2018 Thesis http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/119936 1079909354 eng MIT theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed, downloaded, or printed from this source but further reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582 59 pages application/pdf Massachusetts Institute of Technology
spellingShingle Mechanical Engineering.
Townsend, Stephen (Stephen C.)
Deriving and verifying a general granular locomotion scaling law
title Deriving and verifying a general granular locomotion scaling law
title_full Deriving and verifying a general granular locomotion scaling law
title_fullStr Deriving and verifying a general granular locomotion scaling law
title_full_unstemmed Deriving and verifying a general granular locomotion scaling law
title_short Deriving and verifying a general granular locomotion scaling law
title_sort deriving and verifying a general granular locomotion scaling law
topic Mechanical Engineering.
url http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/119936
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