Duration: 12 months
While cone penetration testing (CPT) and related research have been valuable for understanding soil behaviour and properties on Earth, there is a clear gap in the use of traditional CPT calibration chambers for extraterrestrial materials and instruments. To address this, the main objective of this project is to design a CPT calibration chamber tailored to the lunar environment and soils. This chamber will allow laboratory-controlled testing and the development of correlations between CPT measurements and geotechnical engineering properties of lunar simulants. We will define requirements, select instruments and materials, and complete the chamber design. The chamber design should provide flexibility for testing and incorporating other relevant geotechnical tools, sensors, or data acquisition systems. The system should also be X-Ray transparent so that we can perform 3D-XRCT imaging before, during, and after experiments; this enables significant gains in knowledge by “seeing” how the penetrometer interacts with the surrounding soil.
