Fragmentations caused by hypervelocity collisions of debris particles with pressurized vessels

Collisions and orbital breakups are considered to play the most important role in determining the scenario of debris evolution in low Earth orbits and in geostationary orbit. Hypervelocity collisions with debris fragments could be very dangerous for spacecrafts. Most of spacecrafts contain pressurized gas-filled or fluid-filled vessels as structural elements. Fragmentation of a gas-filled or fluid-filled containment in hypervelocity collision has definite peculiarities and differs from trivial perforations of walls. The primary goal of the present investigation is to follow the transformation of the kinetic energy of the fragments cloud and its contribution to internal loading of the containment. The secondary goal is to investigate if the internal atmosphere filling the containment could serve as an additional bumper shield to protect the rear wall from perforation.