Speaker
Description
The Plasma wind tunnel facilities at IRS have been used for ground testing since the 1980s. The basic techniques for material testing have remained largely unchanged. New developments and a renewed interest in the phenomena affecting and accompanying break-up of derelict satellites and space debris have necessitated the improvement of existing techniques, development of new techniques, or novel application of existing techniques.
We have followed a new idea for ground testing by introducing a mechanical load application method. Typical mechanical loads during re-entry have been characterized and may be applied during plasma wind tunnel testing. An extension of the LHTS technique of Kolesnikov has been proposed to correctly scale the plasma wind tunnel condition to the necessary geometries. This also requires novel heat flux measurements to characterize the conditions, which may be used to determine heat flux reduction for different materials. Spectroscopic measurements can be tailored to the intended application of the experiments, with the possibility to use a wide spectral range, or record specific spectral phenomena with kHz framerates. This data can be compared with airborne observation data collected during the last decades of observation campaigns. Non-intrusive photogrammetric measurements yield high-resolution 3-D surface information to track deformation as well as the formation of surface oxide layers.
The final presentation will present the application of new, improved, or novel application of techniques to comprehensively characterize material response during all phases of destructive re-entry.
