This paper describes a setup for thrust measurement in ablative laser propulsion experiments, based on a simple ballistic pendulum associated to an imaging system, which is being assembled at IEAv. A light aluminium pendulum holding samples is placed inside a 100 liters vacuum chamber with two optical windows: the first (in ZnSe) for the laser beam and the second (in fused quartz) for the pendulum visualization. A TEA‐ CO 2 laser beam is focused to the samples providing ablation and transferring linear moment to the pendulum as a whole. A CCD video camera captures the oscillatory movement of the pendulum and the its trajectory is obtained by image processing. By fitting the trajectory of the pendulum to a dumped sinusoidal curve is possible to obtain the amplitude of the movement which is directly related to the momentum transfered to the sample.


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    Title :

    Thrust Measurements in Ballistic Pendulum Ablative Laser Propulsion Experiments


    Contributors:

    Conference:

    BEAMED ENERGY PROPULSION: Fifth International Symposium on Beamed Energy Propulsion ; 2007 ; Kailua‐Kona (Hawaii)


    Published in:

    AIP Conference Proceedings ; 997 , 1 ; 143-146


    Publication date :

    2008-04-28


    Size :

    4 pages





    Type of media :

    Conference paper


    Type of material :

    Electronic Resource


    Language :

    English



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