Multi-use laser impulse pendulum and laser propulsion parameters measurement

In order to investigate the mechanisms of both the air-breathing and the ablation modes of laser propulsion under laboratory conditions, a multi-use laser impulse pendulum (MULIP) is developed. The measurable impulse range is from 1.0×10-4 to 3.8×10-3 N·s. The experimental calibration data agree well with the theoretical calculated data. With MULIP, the ablation mode has been performed, in which a high power pulsed Nd:glass laser (λ= 1.06μm, τ=20 ns) and a gray PVC film sample are used. The experimental results show that the maximum momentum coupling coefficient Cm is 7.73×10-5 N/W, and the maximum specific impulse Isp is 208.6 s.

Experimental research on impulse coupling effect of a multi-pulse laser on an aluminum target

Impact and torsion pendulums are applied in impulse coupling experiments of high-energy laser irradiation of space debris. It is difficult to achieve a multi-pulse experiment and thus hard to analyze the multi-pulse impulse coupling effect. Here, we designed a new recoil impulse experimental measurement system of non-contact, multidegrees of freedom, and multi-pulse irradiation. The system used a low-pressure and low-temperature vacuum chamber to simulate the space environment, the pinning effect of magnetic levitation to achieve aluminum target suspension, and high-speed cameras to record the displacement over time to calculate the impulse of the target.Then the impulse coupling experiment of multi-pulse laser irradiation on the aluminum target was performed.The result shows that the multi-pulse impulse coupling effect is not the linear accumulation of coupling results by every single-pulse and multi-pulse coefficient that decreases with the increase of the number of pulses, and eventually stabilizes as the decrease gets smaller.

Shock effects on the upper limit of the collision weld process window

The maximum flyer impact velocity based on a dynamic solidification cracking mechanism is proposed to describe the upper limit of collision welding process windows.Thus,the upper limit of the weld window is governed by the evolution of dynamic stresses and temperatures at the weld interface.Current formulations for the upper limit of the collision weld window assume that both the flyer and target are made of the same material and approximate stress propagation velocities using the acoustic velocity or the shear wave velocity of the weld material.However,collision welding fundamentally depends on the impacts that generate shockwaves in weld members,which can dominate the stress propagation velocities in thin weld sections.Therefore,this study proposes an alternative weld window upper limit that approximates stress propagation using shock velocities calculated from modified 1-D Rankine-Hugoniot relations.The shock upper limit is validated against the experimental and simulation data in the collision welding literature,and offers a design tool to rapidly predict more accurate optimal collision weld process limits for similar and dissimilar weld couples compared to existing models without the cost or complexity of high-fidelity simulations.

Photon energy transfer on titanium targets for laser thrusters

Using two infrared pulsed lasers systems,a picosecond solid-state Nd:YAG laser with tuneable repetition rate(400 kHz-1 MHz)working in the burst mode of a multi-pulse train and a femtosecond Ti:sapphire laser amplifier with tuneable pulse duration in the range of tens of femtoseconds up to tens of picoseconds,working in single-shot mode(TEWALASS facility from CETAL-NILPRP),we have investigated the optimal laser parameters for kinetic energy transfer to a titanium target for laser-thrust applications.In the single-pulse regime,we controlled the power density by changing both the duration and pulse energy.In the multi-pulse regime,the train’s number of pulses(burst length)and the pulse energy variation were investigated.Heat propagation and photon reflection-based models were used to simulate the obtained experimental results.In the single-pulse regime,optimal kinetic energy transfer was obtained for power densities of about 500 times the ablation threshold corresponding to the specific laser pulse duration.In multi-pulse regimes,the optimal number of pulses per train increases with the train frequency and decreases with the pulse power density.An ideal energy transfer efficiency resulting from our experiments and simulations is close to about 0.0015%.