The design of unmanned material collection systems requires a great deal of foresight and innovative design on the engineer's part in order to produce solutions to problems operators may encounter in the field. In this thesis, the development of a particulate collection system for use onboard a lightweight, helicopter deployable ground robot is presented. The Unmanned Systems Laboratory at Virginia Tech is developing a ground sampling robot to be carried in the payload pod of a Yamaha RMAX unmanned aerial vehicle. The robot's ultimate objective is to collect material samples from a hazardous environment. The pneumatic system presented here is a novel design developed to collect particulate without draining the resources of the robot. Vacuum samplers have been developed in the past, but they are large and cumbersome and require large amounts of electrical energy to operate. The pneumatic particulate collection system utilizes the kinetic energy from the release of compressed air to transport the particulate to a collection chamber. Consideration is given to the drop in pressure of the air supply tank as it empties, and a feasible air supply tank design is presented. Two forms of particulate collection are investigated experimentally: jet impingement and particle entrainment (i.e. steep attack angle and parallel flow). Turbulent, free jet characteristics and critical velocities of particles are studied. Ultimately, a final design is presented that effectively collects particulate material from the top 5/8" layer of both thick and thin particle beds. / Master of Science

A pneumatic particulate collection system harnesses the energy associated with the release of a compressed gas to transport particulate to a collection chamber. In an effort to improve the efficiency of a previously designed collection system, high speed imaging in conjunction with computational fluid dynamics (CFD) was utilized to highlight design deficiencies. Areas of recirculation within the collection device as well as impingement of the sampling surface were observed through the testing and CFD analysis. The basis of the improved collection system was conceived through research of pneumatic transport and the deficiencies found through testing and simulation. An improved rectangular-duct-styled system was designed in three main stages. A variety of filters used to contain the desired particulate were characterized through testing for use in simulations as well as fluids calculations. The improved system was then analyzed utilizing compressible and incompressible flow calculations and design iterations were conducted with CFD to determine the final parameters. The final design was simulated with a multiphase flow model to examine the particulate entrainment performance. The improved collection system efficiently expanded and developed the gas flow prior to the collection area to employ the particulate entrainment process. The final design was constructed with an additive manufacturing process and experimentally tested to validate the simulations and flow calculations. The testing proved that the final design operated purely on particulate entrainment and collected only the top layer of particles as simulated. The improved collection system eliminated all areas of flow recirculation and impingement of the particle bed to provide a more efficient sampling device. / Master of Science

The objective of this thesis is to investigate the flow conditions that lead to coarse grain entrainment at near incipient motion conditions. Herein, a new conceptual approach is proposed, which in addition to the magnitude of hydrodynamic force or flow power, takes into account the duration of the flow event. Two criteria for inception of grain entrainment, namely the critical impulse and critical energy concepts, are proposed and compared. These frameworks adopt a force or energy perspective, considering the momentum or energy transfer from each flow event to the particle respectively, to describe the phenomenon. A series of conducted mobile particle experiments, are analyzed to examine the validity of the proposed approaches. First a set of bench-top experiments incorporates an electromagnet which applies pulses of known magnitude and duration to a steel spherical particle in a controlled fashion, so as to identify the critical level for entrainment. The utility of the above criteria is also demonstrated for the case of entrainment by the action of turbulent flow, via analysis of a series of flume experiments, where both the history of hydrodynamic forces exerted on the particle as well as its response are recorded simultaneously. Statistical modeling of the distribution of impulses, as well as conditional excess impulses, is performed using distributions from Extreme Value Theory to effectively model the episodic nature of the occurrence of these events. For the examined uniform and low mobility flow conditions, a power law relationship is proposed for describing the magnitude and frequency of occurrence of the impulse events. The Weibull and exponential distributions provide a good fit for the time between particle entrainments. In addition to these statistical tools, a number of Adaptive Neuro-Fuzzy Inference Systems employing different input representations are used to learn the nonlinear dynamics of the system and perform statistical prediction. The performance of these models is assessed in terms of their broad validity, efficiency and forecast accuracy. Even though the impulse and energy criteria are deeply interrelated, the latter is shown to be advantageous with regard to its performance, applicability and extension ability. The effect of single or multiple highly energetic events carried by certain coherent flow structures (mainly strong sweep events) with regard to the particle response is also investigated. / Ph. D.