Design and Analysis of a Whipple Shield

The Whipple shield, an innovation first proposed in the 1940s, is a common way by which spacecraft are protected from the threat of meteoroid impact. Engineers and scientists have learned how to track and respond to potential collisions with other spacecraft and observable objects, so it is now the smallest untraceable debris that pose the greatest risk. This work explores the design and optimisation of a two-layer metallic Whipple shield. The ‘new’ Cour-Palais ballistic limit equations are used in conjunction with various correction factors and modifiers from additional works and assembled into a model found to be 78.9% accurate against a bank of test data. A brute-force optimisation algorithm analyses a broad range of configurations against a minimum critical projectile diameter and selects three solutions based on minimum mass and proposed “performance” and “value” factors. The relationship between the performance factor and the shield’s configuration are considered. Finite element (FE) and smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) methods are explored as numerical solutions, but ultimately relinquished and recommended for future work.