Advanced all-metal orbital debris shield performance at 7 to 17 km/s

Increasing demands on orbital debris shielding systems have spurred efforts to develop shields that are more efficient than the standard single-bumper system. For example, for a given total bumper mass, experiments at velocities near 7 km/s have shown that a multiple-bumper system is more efficient than a single bumper in preventing wall perforation. However, the performance of multiple bumper systems at velocities above 7 km/s is unknown. To address this problem, the cadmium surrogate-material technique described by Schmidt et al. [1] has been extended to two dual bumper systems. A complete dimensional analysis is developed to include similarity requirements for the intermediate layers. Results of experiments, for impact angles of 0° and 45°, are presented and compared to those for single bumpers, along with limited results for an equal-mass four-bumper shield. Surprisingly, for scaled velocities near 16 km/s at normal incidence, a single bumper defeats impactors approximately 30% larger in diameter than multiple bumpers of the same total areal density.