Grants and Contracts Details
Description
Micrometeoroid and orbital debris pose a significant threat to the success of all NASA space operations. An effective class of shielding
incorporates a foam core sandwich panel. Here, the incident particle fragments experience repeated shocks as they travel through
the foam core, vaporizing as they strike individual foam ligaments. Unfortunately, physical validation is difficult to conduct and
prohibitively expensive. This both limits the number of shield designs that can be evaluated and severely impedes the determination
of optimal engineering safety factors. These urgent issues necessitate accurate numerical models appropriate for both the design and
validation of new and existing shielding materials.
This work will result in multiple distinct, but related outcomes. One is a highly versatile structure generation tool, KICSS, that can
build representations of metallic foams and compute their properties with finite element analysis. In the past, the inherently random
structure of foam materials has significantly hindered the construction of accurate numerical models. Concurrently, another outcome
is a physics-based (quantum-mechanical) understanding of how the properties of intrinsic foam materials evolve during service
lifetime (i.e. repeated hypervelocity impacts). These two outcomes will be incorporated to produce more accurate inputs for established
HVI models critical to a number of NASA missions.
Status | Finished |
---|---|
Effective start/end date | 8/1/20 → 1/3/23 |
Funding
- National Aeronautics and Space Administration: $201,156.00
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