Hypervelocity Impact on Composites: the Effect of the Impactor Type
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HYPERVELOCITY IMPACT ON COMPOSITES: THE EFFECT OF THE IMPACTOR TYPE S. Katz(1), E. Grossman(1), A. Brill(2), I. Gouzman(1), G. Lempert(1), and H. D. Wagner(3) (1) Space Environment Section – Soreq NRC, Yavne 81800, Israel, +972-8-9434316, [email protected] (2) Rafael, Israel (3) Department of Materials and Interfaces - Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot 76100, Israel ABSTRACT miles above the face of the Earth puts at risk other low- earth orbit (LEO) satellites in close encounter. In the Spacecraft structures are exposed to hypervelocity past other two operational satellites were impacted by impact derived from space debris and micro-meteoroids. space debris: the weather satellite Meteosat 8 was The effect of the flyer material properties impacting impacted in 2007, and in 1996 the collision between the upon different targets at hypervelocity was carried out French CERISE military satellite and a 1 m fragment using a laser driven flyer (LDF) system for simulating that was generated from the explosion of an Ariane 4 hypervelocity impact. At hypervelocity impact both the upper stage 10 years prior [1]. flyer and the target materials are exposed to high strains An example of hypervelocity impact of spacecraft and high strain-rate deformations, as well as to high with meteoroids is from the Giotto spacecraft and its temperatures which are being developed at the instance passage near Halley's Comet during 1986. Particle of the impact. Knowing the effect of these parameters impacts led to the failure of some experiments and a on the impactor and target can help in predicting the change in the attitude of the vehicle at closest encounter final damage. [2]. The target materials studied in this research were Damage to surfaces in the space environment as a different spacecraft shielding materials, including result of particle collisions can occur in these basic conventional single layer of woven Kevlar/epoxy forms: erosion, penetration, and puncture [3]. Erosion of composite and aluminum, which are known to be used thermal control and optical surfaces may alter their as spacecraft bumper shield, and polycarbonate which is thermo-optical properties. Erosion of a surface leading used as glass windows substitute material. to roughening can lead to problems in the re-entry. To The hypervelocity impacts were carried out with tolerate hypervelocity impact spacecraft should be either nickel or aluminum as flyer materials. The effect design with adequate shielding, which will protect the of the impactor properties was studied in regard to the crew or satellites sensitive parts. depth of penetration and the damaged area in the target At hypervelocity impact, high strains, strain rates, materials. A two-dimensional axisymmetric model of pressures and temperatures are being developed in both the impactor and the target was run on a commercial the impactor and the target material during the finite element (FE) package ANSYS AUTODYN penetration process. It is necessary to understand both software. The materials properties in the model took impactor and target materials behavior under these into consideration both impactor and target strain rate conditions, in order to understand the damaged evolved. and temperature effects. The results of the FE Each material reacts differently to high strain rates simulation were compared to the experimental results depending on its structure. For example, the unit cell and a good agreement between the two was found. structure in metals, such as FCC or BCC, affects the dislocation flow in a different manner [5]. Modeling the 1. INTRODUCTION materials response should take into account the dependence of each property by the strain-rate, the Since the beginning of man invaded space thousands temperature, the strain, the work-hardening or thermal of spacecraft and satellites have been launched to the softening behavior. An accurate description of all of cosmos. Therefore, in addition to the natural meteoroids these phenomena is lacking, due to its high complexity. environment there is a continuously growing population Over the last three decades, several constitutive models of space debris, which are artificial or man-made debris. have been introduced in order to connect the materials The last event of hypervelocity impact of an strength with the strains, strain rates, and temperatures, operational satellite by space debris was on February including for example Johnson–Cook model [6], or 10, 2009 when the Iridium 33 and Cosmos 2251 Zerilli–Armstrong model [7]. communications satellites collided over northern Walker et al [8] studied the depth of penetration Siberia. The location of the impact at approximately 490 (DOP) as a function of impactor velocity for three different metals and showed that the depth of flyer path twice. The two parallel beams are set at a penetration increased with the velocity. A comparison known distance of 13 mm from each other. A of the normalized DOP into various types of semi- photodiode attached to a scope receives the continuous infinite aluminum as a function of flyer velocity for laser signal. As the flyers cross the continuous laser's both aluminum and nickel flyers reveals that the DOP of path, two peaks are detected by the scope, allowing the nickel into aluminum was higher in comparison to velocity calculation. aluminum into aluminum, for the same velocity. A study of static and dynamic Vickers indentations for quantifying the dynamic hardness was carried out by Koeppel and Subhash [9], who found out that the dynamic hardness of nickel is about 12% higher than the static one, whereas for aluminum it is only 1% higher. There are contradictory results regarding the correlation between the depth of the penetration and the impactor strength [10-12]. Simulations have to take into account the combined effects of thermal softening of both the impactor and target materials, and not rely only on one of them. The influence of each of the parameters including the yield strength, strain and strain rate hardening, and thermal softening on the final damage should be understood. The objective of the present work is to understand the damage mechanisms of hypervelocity impacted materials, and specifically, the effect of the flyer material properties on the damaged area. For this purpose flyers made of different metals, aluminum and nickel, as well as different target materials were used. Fig. 1. A schematic drawing of the Laser driven flyer The absorbing target materials included aluminum, facility and the set up for flyer velocity measurement. polycarbonate, and woven Kevlar/epoxy composite. These materials are used in spacecraft as bumper shields Examples of two different tests, one for measuring [13, 14]. the velocity of the nickel impactor and the second for measuring the velocity of the aluminum impactor, 2. MATERIALS AND METHODS striking polycarbonate target is demonstrated in Fig 2. The two curves which are presented in Fig. 2. have two In order to simulate hypervelocity impact a unique peaks each. The first peak is obtained when the flyer laser driven flyer (LDF) system was used [15-18]. The first crosses the He:Ne beam, and the second peak is LDF system (shown schematically in Fig. 1) is based on obtained when it crosses the He:Ne beam again, after a Sapphire-Titanium laser (Thompson Inc.) with a the beam returns from the prism (see Fig. 1.). As can be wave-length of 810 nm, pulse energies from 250 to 710 seen the nickel's peaks are sharper than the aluminum mJ, and pulse length of 300 ps. The laser beam is ones. A wider peak indicates on a cloud of particles directed and focused by a set of mirrors and lenses into moving ahead towards the target, rather than one flyer. a vacuum chamber at a base pressure of about 65 The different behavior of these two materials can be mTorr. Inside the chamber, the laser beam hits a target explained by their various responses to the shock waves of metal-glass laminate at the glass side. The beam that are being created by the pulsed laser interaction passes through the glass without interacting with it, and with these two flyer materials. hits the metal-glass interface. This interaction creates In this study wide range of absorbing target confined plasma with high pressure in the range of GPa materials were used, including, commercial woven [19] at the glass-metal interface, which then initiates a Kevlar/epoxy composites 120 µm thick film, spallation process. The pressure applied by the plasma polycarbonate 2 mm thick, and aluminum 100 µm thick causes the spalled area to fly away at ultrahigh velocity film. as a metal flyer. Both aluminum and nickel were used as The fracture of the micro-composites due to a metal material, and the flyers velocities reached up to hypervelocity impact was studied using Optical 3 km/s. The flyers velocities were measured using a microscope and Environmental Scanning Electron setup also shown schematically in Fig.1. A continuous Microscope (ESEM), allowing fracture characterization He:Ne laser beam is set orthogonal to the flyer's without the need for a conductive coating. The flyer trajectory, and by using a prism the beam crosses the penetration depth was measured using Scanning are two competing mechanisms at high strain rates; one Acoustic Microscope (SAM). is thermal softening and the other is strain hardening. The dominant mechanism depends on the material properties such as, structure, phase transformations, melting temperature, etc, an issue that is discussed 0.000 below. -0.001 (a) (b) -0.002 -0.003 Intensity (au) Intensity -0.004 -0.005 Al on PC Ni on PC 0.5 mm 0.5 mm -0.006 0.000000 0.000002 0.000004 Time (µs) Fig. 3. ESEM images of the impact entrance (a) and Fig. 2. Flyer velocity measurements as was monitored exit (b) holes of woven-Kevlar/epoxy composites by the He:Ne laser for both nickel and aluminum flyers impacted by aluminum flyer at a velocity of 2.3 km/s.