Study on shielding performance of aerogel/fiberglass composite stuffed shield

Abstract

In previous research, excellent shielding performance was found when the SiO2 aerogel/fiberglass composite (SAFC) was stuffed in shield. It could be an economical choice to improve debris shielding performance by applying SAFC stuffed shield to spacecrafts. A series of hypervelocity impact tests were carried out on the hypervelocity impact range A and range C in CARDC. The projectiles are aluminum spheres with diameter of 5.5 mm to 6.3 mm and the impact velocity was around 4.8 km/s. The targets were SAFC stuffed shield and aluminum triple-wall shield with the same areal density. Comparing with the aluminum triple-wall shield, the shield stuffed with SAFC was capable to considerably increase the critical projectile diameter by 160% at 4.8 km/s. Furthermore, the same SAFC stuffed shield structure was hit by 6.0 mm aluminum sphere at 8.3 ± 0.2 km/s and shielding performance were primarily discussed.