CHARACTERIZATION OF HYPERVELOCITY IMPACT DEBRIS - NAVAL RESEARCH LABORATORY TESTS

Characterization of debris from hypervelocity impact events is an important prerequisite for analytical or empirical predictive modeling of those events. One feature of a useful model would be its ability to predict the characteristics of the debris cloud produced by the impact, and this feature cannot be evaluated without a body of test data with which to compare the analytical predictions. In the current effort, debris produced by hypervelocity impact experiments at the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) is collected and described. An attempt is also made to construct a parametric model of the data in order to assess the effectiveness of this approach. A model based on a linear relationship is seen to perform well, while a parabolic relationship performs less well, and a bilinear relationship performs poorly. A lognormal distribution is seen to describe the debris more effectively than an exponential distribution. However, the performance of the exponential distribution is seen to improve when the very largest fragments are removed from consideration.