Results and Discussion
As mentioned in the previous section, the purpose of these experiments was to quantify the effect the material churn direction and front pontoon width have upon the power consumption, velocity, and excavation mass performance of the craft across a wide variety of screw angular velocities, load times, and ramp angles. In the following subsections, the experimental data for the excavation rate, power, velocity, cost of transport, and excavation transport rate are presented and analyzed. It should be noted that the mobility and excavation performance was consistent across all data collection runs and that no drop-off in performance was observed.
Excavation Rate