CHARACTERIZATION OF HYPERVELOCITY IMPACT DEBRIS - NAVAL RESEARCH LABORATORY TESTS

Characterization of debris from hypervelocity impact events is an impo rtant prerequisite for analytical or empirical predictive modeling of those events. One feature of a useful model would be its ability to pr edict 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, de bris produced by hypervelocity impact experiments at the Naval Researc h Laboratory (NRL) is collected and described. An attempt is also made to construct a parametric model of the data in order to assess the ef fectiveness of this approach. A model based on a linear relationship i s seen to perform well, while a parabolic relationship performs less w ell, and a bilinear relationship performs poorly. A lognormal distribu tion is seen to describe the debris more effectively than an exponenti al distribution. However, the performance of the exponential distribut ion is seen to improve when the very largest fragments are removed fro m consideration.