Specialised Imaging reports how US researchers** used its Kirana ultra-high speed video camera to investigate the effects of liquid and solid impacts on hypersonic aerospace bodies.
When an object moves through the atmosphere at hypervelocity, it can get damaged by dust particles or water droplets suspended in that atmosphere. Simply firing dust particles or liquid droplets at samples of material is not always useful in understanding these interactions, so researchers have devised experiments to study the effects of hypersonic bodies moving through the path of droplets thereby simulating weather phenomena.
Since the size and shape of a droplet will impact the amount of damage it does to materials in a high-speed collision, it is important to characterize their exact breakup behaviour. The described experimental approach used a Light Gas Gun facility to accelerate various materials to high velocities, introduce water droplets, and study their interactions using advanced diagnostic techniques.
Southwest Research Institute Light Gas Gun
A Kirana ultra-high speed video camera, operating at 5 million frames per second, was used to image the interaction of a projectile at 2.4 km/s velocity with a stream of liquid water droplets in a low-pressure nitrogen medium. Experimental results showed that droplet breakup phenomena including edge-stripping behaviour, liquid jetting from the droplet-projectile impact point, and other multiphase hypersonic flow phenomena were present in the experiment.
Assembled aerospace material projectiles Kirana07M ultra-high-speed video camera
Ultra high speed image of droplets causing projectile edge stripping
To read the full experimental research article please visit https://www.specialised-imaging.com/application/files/9916/8493/1245/SI_RA_High-Speed_Imaging_of_Droplet_Impact_on_a_Hypervelocity_Projectile.pdf
