Simulation of Foam-Impact Effects on the Space Shuttle Thermal Protection System

A kernel free particle‐finite element method for hypervelocity impact simulation

“…This example does not model a specific experiment; rather it was used to measure the improved computational efficiency of the method described here, in a hypervelocity impact application of current research interest [6,36]. The projectile material, diameter (0.618 cm), and impact velocity (7 km/s) represent a typical orbital debris impact threat [4], while the target plate thickness (0.47 cm) is characteristic of reinforced carbon-carbon components of the Space Shuttle thermal protection system [6].…”

Thermomechanical Analysis of a Damaged Thermal Protection System

“…Extensive investigation has attributed the cause for the accident to a damaged RCC panel on the left wing leading edge [1]. The accident resulted in a few studies on damaged TPS, however, most of these studies only sought to either determine and characterize types of damage caused by debris impact via experiments [18] or numerical methods [11,13,46], or determine the change in aerothermal loading due to TPS defects [12,34].…”

“…13: Maximum von Mises stresses attained for each TPS component with or without pressure dependency in conductivity…”

Study on the interfacial bonding mechanism of Al/Mg gradient material

“…This kind of collision becomes the top threat to the safe operation of orbit spacecraft [1,2]. A variety of high performance protective materials and structures, such as Kevlar cloth, Nextel cloth and Beta cloth [3][4][5][6][7][8][9], have been developed. A large number of computational and experimental works show that the Ti/Al/Mg impedancegraded material [10,11] is a potential space debris protection material because of the higher efficient absorption and dissipation of fragment kinetic energy compared to the homogeneous single-layer sheets [12,13].…”