A Comprehensive Exploration of High-Speed Vehicles through Laser-Driven Flyers

This paper proposes a novel application of a high-throughput benchtop experimental setup to quickly evaluate the materials developed for spacecrafts and hypersonic vehicles. By simulating the impact of high-speed projectiles/debris with spacecrafts using a micron sized laser-driven flyer plate to impact test vehicle materials. The well-established shock microscope setup employs a flat-topped laser pulse to punch out a circular metal foil at desired terminal velocities such that it collides with a target positioned directly in its path. This setup offers flexibility by launching different materials as flyer plates at a range of supersonic to hypersonic velocities under various atmospheric conditions and vacuum pressures. The present study uses 25 μm thick, 0.5 mm wide circular aluminum foils as hypersonic debris travelling at 2- 4 km/s terminal velocities. Test material of aluminum clad quartz glass with different cladding thicknesses are used as targets to present our approach. The impacted targets for each f the different test conditions are examined postmortem. Physical damage such as impact crater diameter are characterized through optical microscopy. In the framework of this approach, we aim to estimate the extent of damage the target may sustain under different test conditions and compare with large-scale experimentation conducted using gas-guns to present the advantage of proposed approach in prototyping.