Modeling multi-scale material response of foam core sandwich panels for MMOD protection against hypervelocity impacts

Micrometeoroid and orbital debris pose a significant threat to the success of all NASA space operations. An effective class of shielding incorporates a foam core sandwich panel. Here, the incident particle fragments experience repeated shocks as they travel through the foam core, vaporizing as they strike individual foam ligaments. Unfortunately, physical validation is difficult to conduct and prohibitively expensive. This both limits the number of shield designs that can be evaluated and severely impedes the determination of optimal engineering safety factors. These urgent issues necessitate accurate numerical models appropriate for both the design and validation of new and existing shielding materials.

This work will result in multiple distinct, but related outcomes. One is a highly versatile structure generation tool, KICSS, that can build representations of metallic foams and compute their properties with finite element analysis. In the past, the inherently random structure of foam materials has significantly hindered the construction of accurate numerical models. Concurrently, another outcome is a physics-based (quantum-mechanical) understanding of how the properties of intrinsic foam materials evolve during service lifetime (i.e. repeated hypervelocity impacts). These two outcomes will be incorporated to produce more accurate inputs for established HVI models critical to a number of NASA missions.

This work will result in a highly versatile structure generation tool and a physics-based understanding of how thep roperties of intrinsic foam materials evolve during service lifetime. These two outcomes will produce more accurate inputs for models critical to a number of NASA missions.

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