Development of Plasma Gun as a Micro Meteorite Impact Simulator

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The advanced technology for the hypervelocity acceleration of projectiles has been clearing the hypervelocity impact phenomena on a target. It will be available also for researching material strength against impact and the study of the protective structure of space crafts. The plasma accelerator has been developed to simulate micrometeoroid impacts on the crafts. It has been suggested that the mass range and the most probable velocity of micrometeoroids in space are between 10-15 and 1g and 20 km/s, respectively.We have accelerated small particles with a single-stage plasma accelerator, which is easily operated but does not always attain the most effective acceleration and a high impact rate on a target. Therefore, we constructed a two-stage plasma accelerator to realize higher impact velocities than previous ones and higher impact rates on targets. The theory of acceleration has been proposed by Igenbergs et al., but the operational system here is quite different from theirs. The system was tested to accelerate microprojectiles.We constructed a two-stage plasma accelerator and attempted to conduct the acceleration of glass beads as microprojectiles. In this cooperational research, it was confirmed that projectiles were separated well when launched from a sabot, and that our laser trigger system operated well. The two-stage operation was conducted in comparison with single-stage one. It increased the projectile velocity and the impact rate on a target extremely. The velocity greatly depended on the position at the beginning of acceleration and the optimum position was found. Although in the past the low impact rate had made the micrometeoroid impact simulation difficult in the single-stage operation, this two-stage one with higher impact rate will give the skillful simulation.