Development of Plasma Gun as a Micro Meteorite Impact Simulator

先进的弹丸超高速加速技术正在消除弹丸超高速撞击目标的现象。它还将用于研究材料的抗冲击强度和研究航天器的保护结构。等离子体加速器是为了模拟微流星体对飞行器的撞击而开发的。空间微流星体的质量范围和最大可能速度分别在10-15和1g/S和20公里/S之间。我们用单级等离子体加速器加速小粒子，这种加速器操作简单，但并不总是达到最有效的加速和对目标的高撞击速率。因此，我们建造了一个两级等离子体加速器，以实现比以往更高的撞击速度和对目标的更高撞击速率。Igenbergs等人提出了加速理论，但这里的操作系统与他们的有很大不同。该系统被用于加速微弹。我们建造了一个两级等离子体加速器，并尝试将玻璃微珠作为微弹进行加速。在这次合作研究中，证实了弹丸从弹托发射时分离良好，我们的激光触发系统运行良好。对两级操作和单级操作进行了比较。它极大地提高了弹丸速度和对目标的撞击率。速度在很大程度上依赖于加速开始时的位置，并找到了最佳位置。虽然过去较低的撞击率给单级运行的微流星体撞击模拟带来了困难，但这种撞击率更高的两级撞击模拟将给出巧妙的模拟。

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.