Research On The Damage Characteristics Of Stuffed Whipple Shields Impacted By Nonmetallic Projectile Under Space Thermal Environment

The threat of space debris to on-orbit spacecraft is more and more serious. In order to improve the ability of spacecraft to defend space debris and assess the risk,it is necessary to study on shield design by a series of hypervelocity impact experiment on the earth. The environment of spacecraft staying on is very complex, mainly including space debris environment, space thermal environment, electron irradiation environment, etc., these greatly affect the life expectancy and the reliability of the spacecraft. With the background of space debris protection and the aid of high-speed impact ground simulation device, the paper studies the effects of the performance of spacecraft stuffed Whipple shield by the space thermal environment, such as extreme temperature environment and thermal cycling environment, in order to find out the temperature effect on the performance of basalt fiber and Kevlar stuffed Whipple shield by the high-speed impacting of non-metallic projectile. It is an effective reference for the design of spacecraft protection structure.First of all, this paper studied the basalt fiber and Kevlar fiber stuffed Whipple shield damage characteristics of the impacting of non-metallic projectile at a certain speed by the two stage light gas gun impact experiments. This paper discovered the different influence of the performance of stuffed Whipple shield between the filler materials which is under high & low temperature alternating treatments and which is not. In the meanwhile this paper studied the impact characteristics of the projectile which is under temperature alternating treatments and which is not. The range of the temperature alternating treatments is from 203 K to 423 K.Secondly, this paper studied the high-speed impact damage characteristics of basalt fiber and Kevlar stuffed Whipple shield under extreme temperatures and the influence of temperature to the performance of hypervelocity impact of non-metallic projectile on the stuffed Whipple shield. The low-temperature is set to 210 K while the normal temperature is 293 K and the high-temperature is 420 K. Every experiment is under a similar impact speed.Finally in order to study the influence on the protective performance of stuffed Whipple shield by the mixed thermal environment, more experiments were implemented, including the experiments under mixed high & low temperature alternating treatments to the projectile and stuffed materials and extreme temperatures. In the end, the paper summarized the main conclusions which is meaningful to the engineering and pointed out the shortcomings of this research and further investigation directions.