14 DAY TRIAL // Mankind might one day live on the Moon or on other planets but before doing so, people must know how to build liveable places somewhere else other than Earth.
The key element (and the first one too) of a building is its foundation; it needs to be very stable and this has to be tested, except that for future buildings on other planets, tests are rather hard, time consuming and uselessly expensive.
This is why researchers from North Carolina State University made computer models that can use small samples of soil and answer the questions by establishing the way that the soil will interact with foundations.
Dr. Matt Evans, assistant professor of civil, construction and environmental engineering at NC State and co-author of a paper describing the research, said that “if you are going to build a large structure, you have to run a lot of tests on the building site to learn how the soil will behave in relation to the building's foundation.”
You must know how stable it is and how much the foundation could settle over time, and “traditionally, that testing process involves a great deal of equipment, time and money.”
But in some situations you do not have that equipment, time and money, as it would be very difficult to transport the necessary equipment to the surface of the moon.
“We initiated this project, with funding from the North Carolina Space Grant, to answer questions that are essential to the construction of buildings on the moon,” said Evans.
“It's cost-prohibitive to do traditional testing on lunar sites, so we developed a technique for applying computer models that can use a tiny sample to tell us about the potential interface between moon soil and anything we might build,” he added.
Another interesting fact is that this model can be used to do things much closer to home, like assess soil conditions for remote building sites where traditional testing is impractical or extremely expensive, or for military applications and remote research facilities.
The paper is called "Analysis of Pile Behavior in Granular Soils Using DEM," and it focuses on how to use this model when you add gravity.