Improvement of Conical Shaped Charge (CSC) System and Comparison between the Impact Damages Provided by the CSC and Gas Gun Systems

Abstract

A conical shaped charge (CSC) system has great potential for the evaluation of the protection performance of space structures against space debris which flies in space at a hyper velocity exceeding about 10 km/s. On the other hand, in order to establish the evaluation method using a CSC system, the impact damage given by this system and another system, such as a two-staged light gas gun system, should be compared and the effectiveness of this method must be verified; moreover, the correlation of the test results obtained by the two systems must be determined. The authors have already developed a CSC system which can shoot out the jet with almost the same mass and velocity as a two-staged light gas gun system does, i.e., it could shoot one gram jet at about 7 km/s. However, since additional following jets also existed, and eliminating them remained a problem to be solved. This study devised a method of deleting the following jets for the CSC system and confirmed its validity through experiments. Moreover, the shooting performance with the mass and velocity almost equivalent to those of the two-staged light gas gun system was displayed. The correlation between damage areas produced by the CSC system and by the two-staged light gas gun system was determined on the basis of the test results.