Design of Bionic Bucket Teeth and Drag Reduction Analysis

Bucket teeth are located at the end of a bucket, which enable the bucket to dig into soil with a lower resistance. In this paper, the configuration information of a claw tooth of mole crickets was extracted and used for designing the configuration of a bionic bucket tooth which was modified from the CAT-320D excavator bucket tooth. The soil wedging processes of the bionic bucket tooth and the CAT-320D bucket tooth were analyzed using finite element analysis, and the soil wedging performances of the two teeth were compared. The results show that the concave side of the bionic bucket tooth is easy to make a large deformation of the soil, which is help to break the soil interface. The soil disturbance on the convex side of the bionic bucket tooth is small, which is help to reduce the compaction of the dorsal soil and friction. Compared with the CAT-320D bucket tooth, the bionic bucket tooth has a greater effect on wedging the soil, in which the total stress of the soil is smaller. The analysis on the total soil energy shows that the energy consuming of the bionic bucket tooth is lower than that of the CAT-320D bucket tooth.