Study On Ultra - High - Speed Impact Characteristics Of Corrugated Sandwich Protection Structures

With the increasing number of human space activities, the quantity of orbital debris keeps growing dramatically in recent years, which poses great threats to the safety of the orbit spacecraft. In this paper, based on the demand of spacecraft protection against orbital debris, a stuffed corrugation-cored sandwich structure was designed and optimized. Then the hyper-velocity impact characteristics of the stuffed corrugation-cored sandwich under the impact of projectiles of different velocities and different shapes were studied.Firstly, based on the process of Whipple structure under hypervelocity impact, the feasi-bility of the numerical simulation model was verified. The simulation results agree well with both the experimental data and the ballistic limit equation, which illustrates that the SPH method and material models used in simulation are accurate.A new designed spacecraft protection structure, the stuffed corrugation-cored sandwich, was proposed and the shape of the corrugation was optimized. Furthermore, In order to ana-lyze the protection mechanism of the stuffed corrugation-cored sandwich, the hypervelocity impact characteristics of the sandwich under normal impact of spherical projectiles of which the velocity ranging from 3 to 15 km/s were studied. The shock wave propagation characteris-tics, the perforation of the sandwich, the debris cloud description, the energy absorption char-acteristics and the damage of the spacecraft bulkhead were analyzed, as well as the corre-sponding characteristics of the Whipple structure, which shows the more excellent protection performance of the stuffed corrugation-cored sandwich.The process of the protection structure under the impact of six different kinds of projec-tiles with the same mass were simulated. The results shows that the damage ability of non-spherical projectiles are stronger than spherical ones. Furthermore, the projectiles with sharpen nose and large ratio of length to diameter are more likely to damage the protection system of the spacecraft.The research can offer some technical support for the design of the spacecraft protection system and provide new thoughts for the improvement of the protection performance, the lighten of the protection mass and the reduction of the protection cost.