PSI - Issue 52

Huadong Xu et al. / Procedia Structural Integrity 52 (2024) 52–62 Author name / Structural Integrity Procedia 00 (2019) 000 – 000

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(Buslov et al. (2019); Putzar et al. (2019) ). In addition, fabrics are conducive to building inflatable structures which used in low earth orbit or lunar bases, due to their flexibility, foldability and high debris shielding performance(Buslov, Komarov et al. (2019); Erik Seedhouse (2015) ). Many researches have been conducted on the investigation of the mechanical behaviour and shielding performance of fabrics under hypervelocity impact loading. Material properties and structural characteristics are important factors affecting the impact response of fabrics. Sathish Kumar et al. (2023) proposed a hybrid fabric system with interspaced and free-boundary fabric, and observed that the hybrid fabric system showed improved energy absorption. Cha et al. (2020) evaluated the performance of UHMWPE as a MMOD shielding material by comparing to conventional Whipple shield. It was proposed that UHMWPE is a suitable material to replace the existing Kevlar. Zhao et al. (2020) developed a SPH-based (smoothed particle hydrodynamics) computational model for fabrics and their composite under HVI loading. They found out that plain weave fabric had the optimal space debris shielding performance compared with other weave types. Fa-wei et al. (2018) and Ke et al. (2016) reported that fabric could intercept and crack the space debris effectively, and the adhesion degree of Basalt and aramid fabric influences their shielding performance. Rudolph et al. (2012) conducted HVI tests on different flexible materials, and find that the most efficient projectile fragmentation and cloud dispersion are observed on the Kevlar fabric and Refrex fabric target. Moon et al. (2016) proposed a new hybrid composite shielding based on a yarn pull-out energy absorption mechanism, for increasing the specific energy absorbing rate. Kim et al. (2017) and Kim et al. (2018) have been reported that Shear Thickening Fluid (STF) impregnated fabric composites and directly curable composites can be more effectively used as a bumper of hypervelocity shield than pure fabric layers. The evaluation for shielding performance of fabrics should be considering a variety of factors, such as the fragmentation performance for high velocity large debris, the interception performance for low velocity debris particles, and the energy absorbed from the kinetic energy of the projectile. Among them, energy absorption capability is one of the most important reference factors. It is worth pointing out that HVI response is more complex than low velocity or high-velocity impact. Impact at hypervelocity generates extreme pressure, density, and temperature changes in solids, leading to material failure and fragmentation. The projectile eventually become shattered and broken into a debris cloud (Signetti and Heine (2022); Singh and Kumar (2022); Wen et al. (2021) ). It is difficult to calculate the energy absorbed by the fabric through collecting the residual velocity of all fragments. Thus, there is a limited number of researches enable quantitative analysis of the energy absorbed by fabrics. In this paper, the energy absorption capability of multiple fabrics under HVI were evaluated by experiments, and an energy absorption evaluation method for HVI is established by characterizing the damage of the fabric target and the witness plate. The remaining sections of the paper are organized as follows. The section 2 describes the target materials, experimental methods and evaluation methodology of energy absorption in the present work in detail. The section 3 describe the experimental results and energy absorption capability of various fabric under HVI. The section 4 discusses conclusions drawn from the experiments results. Nomenclature Material density Tensile strength E Young’s modulus

Breaking elongation Melting temperature Number of layers in target 1 Area density of single layer fabric Total area density of target Total areal density of the penetrated fabrics Initial velocity of projectiles