PortableDrillingforFrozenCoarse-GrainedMaterial.docVIP

Portable Drilling for Frozen Coarse-Grained Material Tohru Saito International Arctic Research Center, University of Alaska Fairbanks Kenji Yoshikawa Water and Environmental Research Center, University of Alaska Fairbanks Abstract We are drilling boreholes for the permafrost outreach program that involves schools in the arctic circumpolar regions. The purpose of the project is to establish permafrost monitoring stations at schools and have students and teachers participate in gathering data. We drill a 6m deep borehole for the monitoring stations to measure ground temperatures. There are more than 50 sites established, and many of the schools are located in the remote villages. This created a great opportunity and necessity to develop a portable, lightweight small diameter drill system. However, the permafrost conditions and local geology varies greatly. Such portable drill system is strongly affected by the grain size of the frozen materials. The design for the auger and coring bits (mechanical properties) for fine-grained frozen soils are already well developed. However, frozen gravel, boulder, glacial sediments are extremely difficult to drill even when using heavier track mounted hydraulic drill systems. In our outreach project, we tried to develop a method of drilling through frozen gravel using a portable drill system. This study presents our experiments and an introduction of different techniques for a portable drill system. Keywords: auger; gravel; percussion drill; portable drill; rotary percussion system Introduction Portable drill system was probably developed as a percussion system to find shallow groundwater. Sample percussion system was established and widely used in Japan as “Kazusa-hori” in the early 18th century. After the industrial revolution, rotary type of drill systems became more popular than the traditional percussion system. And today, there are much more different types of drill systems widely available for drilling. Table 1 shows th