Survivability Unified Perforation and Cratering Impact Damage (SUPerCID) Model

Space debris is a growing environmental problem which is becoming an economic concern with all the firms and government agencies that are planning to launch constellations of satellites. The Phillips Laboratory and NASA are continuing to spend a large amount of time and money on research to understand and develop models of the debris environment, impact effects and techniques to mitigate these effects. To correctly interpret the space environment, the resulting modes of impact damage, and the potential methods that may be employable to mitigate the effects, generic analytic scaling laws that can adequately describe the impact effects must be used. However, none of the current empirical scaling laws can address all the necessary impact conditons (variations in materials, shape, mass, and velocity) in a physically consistent fashion. This proposal addresses the need for a high fidelity, physics-based model for first-order predictions of meteoroid and debris impact damage and its associated effects on satellite system survivability, reliability and performance. This effort will develop a physically consistent, unified impact damage model (SUPerCID) for predicting perforation and cratering impact damage for use in analyses of the reliability, survivability and probablistic risk of proposed commercial and government spacecraft designs and operations.