SIMULATING HYPERVELOCITY IMPACTS ON CFRP WITH A DISCRETE ELEMENT APPROACH

Numerical simulations provide a powerful tool for investigating satellite breakups resulting from hypervelocity impact, and a discrete element simulation method has been shown to be well suited to model the fragmentation that materials undergo upon impact at high velocities. In this paper, we describe new developments to a discrete element simulation method to allow the modeling of orthotropic materials, specifically carbon fiber reinforced polymers which are commonly used in modern satellites. We model carbon fiber reinforced polymers by using different parameters for fiber and matrix materials in our discrete model. We calibrate our carbon fiber reinforced polymer model’s two free parameters with experimental hypervelocity impact data from literature. Finally, we demonstrate the numerical method’s applicability to simulate the satellite breakups with two simulations: a non-catastrophic sphere-CubeSat impact and a catastrophic CubeSat-CubeSat impact. We compare these scenarios, using aluminum and carbon fiber reinforced polymer CubeSats, to fragment size distributions predicted by the NASA standard satellite breakup model.