TA2 Facility 7 – University of Kent Light Gas Gun Laboratory
Average visit: 5 days
The Kent two-stage light-gas gun is a compact gun, which can fire single mm sized projectiles at speeds between 0.4 and 7.5 km s-1. Smaller projectiles (down to micron scale) can be fired as a cloud of particles in a shot. We have a range of projectiles in stock or users can supply their own. The gun usually fires horizontally. It is also possible to fire vertically, at speeds up to 2 km s-1.
The gun can fire every day in normal use. The speed is measured in each shot. The target chamber is a large vacuum chamber (evacuated down to mbar level for a shot) which has in internal volume of about 1m by 1m by 1 m.
Electrical feedthroughs are available into the chamber so targets can be instrumented during a shot.
The target chamber has viewports so images can be made, but only by high speed video (we have no ultra-high speed cameras).
We can cool or heat targets over a wide temperature range.
The gun has been used to model impact damage to materials, explore projectile fragmentation, look at projectile residues, study projectile capture, look at impact disruption of targets and so on.
Details of the gun are on-line in this recent open access paper by Hibbert et al.
Contact:
Prof Mark Burchell, University of Kent, Canterbury, Kent CT2 7NZ, UK. m.j.burchell@kent.ac.uk
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