The pharmaceutical industry has a large number of applications, which would benefit from significantly improved simulation capabilities for cohesive powders in a variety of pharmaceutical material manufacturing, transport and handling operations. The FDA's Process Analytical Technology (PAT) initiative emphasizes the need for pharmaceutical makers to understand the processes they use and to design the processes for quality, reliability, robustness and consistency. These goals overlap significantly with NASA's needs to better understand the processing of bulk cohesive granular material. Reliable tools to predict powder deformation and flow behavior would greatly facilitate the attainment of such goals.
New high-fidelity simulation tools for cohesive powders will be applicable to a wide range of ISRU situations including excavation, transport, handling, platform mobility, slope stability and wheeled vehicle traction analysis. New designs in all of these areas will benefit from improved robustness and fidelity of simulation models. The ability to test sensitivity of equipment designs to regolith model parameter values, can greatly assist in prioritizing regolith characterization measurements and subsequent optimization of equipment designs once the properties of the regolith have been more accurately characterized. Constitutive models specially designed for very low consolidation states of regolith (which can occur in reduced gravity environments such as on lunar or asteroid surfaces) will provide new capability for simulation and engineering analysis of tools and mission hardware including sample acquisition and handling.
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