Tunnel bits are used to drill medium and hard rocks and EDEM-OS 2-way coupling enables an understanding of the force required to drill, the wear of the drill, and the durability of the drill bit


What is Tunnel Drill Bit?

Tunnel bits are widely used in the mining, and construction industry to mine ore or explore for mineral deposits. Open pit and underground mining drill bits are essential tools in the mining industry. They play a crucial role in ensuring the safety and efficiency of open pit and underground mining operations.

Various shapes and sizes of drill bits are used in mining to drill different conditions of the bulk material such as soft or hard. For example, conical shape bits are used for drilling soft rock, whereas flat and button shapes are used for drilling hard rock

Tunnel/Button shape bits are suitable for dry and wet drilling of medium and hard rocks. It is mainly used in all kinds of mining, transportation, quarrying, and rock/granite-breaking

                                                                 

EDEM-OptiStruct(OS) 2-Way Coupled Simulation Workflow Overview

Simulation Description

To study and understand the force required to drill the medium rock, wear of the drill bit, stress, and durability/life using EDEM-OS, 2-way coupling. The following simulation steps are carried out

v Create a medium rock particulate bed using a Bonded V2 model using EDEM
v Generate FE model from tunnel bit cad model using Simlab
v Define Motion
v Define co-simulation setup
v Run the simulation
EDEM Simulation Setup
v Create Material Models such as Bulk material properties, particle-to-particle interaction, particle-to-geometry interaction, particle shape, size, etc.
v Import the .stp file into EDEM
v Define Physics models such as Hertz-Mindlin no slip, Standard Rolling Friction, and Bonded_V2
v Define Bonded_V2 parameters
v Define factory setup and Bond creation time shown in the below picture
                                          
v Switch on the coupling server shown in below picture
       
OptiStruct Simulation setup
v Import the .stp file into SimLab
v Mesh the geometry as the required average element size
v Create an Rbe2 element
v Create Explicit simulation
v Create a Coupled simulation
 

OptiStruct Simulation Setup

v SimLab learning center helps to learn about FE modeling. Use the link to access the SimLab learning center ” Altair for SimLab Learning Center
OptiStruct Simulation setup Video
 
 
EDEM_OS, 2-Way Coupling Run

Run the coupled simulation from SimLab 2024.0 or the later version shown in the below picture

Coupled Solution à Results à Right Click and Click update

 

 

Tunnel Bit Simulation Results

 

 

Simulation Files:

The following simulation files are attached to the blog post, please click on the file name with extension to download

CAD: Tunnelbit.STEP

EDEM: TunnelBit-EDEM.zip

SimLab: TunnelBit_Simlab.slb

Drillbit Mesh: TunnelBit_mesh.fem