Experimental study on static and impact strength of sintered agglomerates

Porous internal structure is common among small bodies in the planetary systems and possible range of porosity, strength, and scale of in-homogeneity is wide. Icy agglomerates, such as icy dust aggregates in the proto-planetary disks or icy re-accumulated bodies of fragments from impact disruption beyond snow-line would have stronger bulk strength once the component particles physically connect each other due to sintering.In this study, in order to get better understanding of impact disruption process of such bodies, we first investigated the critical tensile (normal) and bending (tangential) forces to break a single neck, the connected part of the sintered particles, using sintered dimer of macro glass particles of ∼5 mm in diameter. We found that the critical tensile force is proportional to the cross-section of the neck when the neck grows sufficiently larger than the surface roughness of the original particles. We also found that smaller force is required to break a neck when the force is applied tangentially to the neck than normally applied. Then we measured the bulk tensile strength of sintered glass agglomerates consisting of 90 particles and showed that the average tensile stress to break a neck of agglomerates in static loading is consistent with the measured value for dimers.Impact experiments with velocity from 40 to 280 m/s were performed for the sintered agglomerates with ∼40% porosity, of two different bulk tensile strengths. The size ratio of the beads to the target was 0.19. The energy density required to catastrophically break the agglomerate was shown to be much less than those required for previously investigated sintered glass beads targets with ∼40% porosity, of which the size of component bead is 10−2 times smaller and the size ratio of the bead to target is also ∼10−2 times smaller than the agglomerates in this study. This is probably due to much smaller number of necks for the stress wave to travel through the agglomerates and therefore the energy dissipation at the necks is minimal. Also, the much larger fraction of the surface particles enables the particles to move more freely and thus be broken more easily. The catastrophic disruption of the agglomerates is shown to occur when the projectile kinetic energy is a few times of the total energy to break all of the necks of the agglomerates. The result implies that finer fragments from sintered agglomerates may have smaller catastrophic disruption energy threshold for shattering (QS∗) than other larger fragments with similar porosity and bulk tensile strength but much larger number of constituent particles. If this is the case, size-dependence of QS∗ (smaller is weaker) is opposite to those usually considered for the bodies in the strength regime.

Research highlights
► Critical tensile force is larger than bending force to break a neck of a dimer.
► Agglomerate breaks by an impact with energy a few times of breaking all the necks.
► Agglomerates with small number of particles are weaker than those of larger numbers.