Monday, July 19, 2010

Abrupting Moonlets

Lots of simulation and programming stuff going on here. Some I'll be showing tomorrow or so. Others I'll post about later today. The cool result of the morning though is that our moonlets keep getting busted up. Over the weekend I did a simulation where the moonlet was set to model a density of 0.5 g/cm^3 (particle internal density of 0.5/0.7 g/cm^3) with larger pieces in the lattice. It still got sheared out. So next up was to go back to the smaller particles with a higher density. I started a simulation with a lattice modeling 0.6 g/cm^3. When I came in this morning I loaded it up and while the moonlet is holding together better than before, it isn't going to make it. It is still falling apart.

This is very significant because those particles have an internal density of 0.85 g/cm^3. That is close to the density of solid ice, yet they aren't holding together against the impacts of the outside size distribution. Next up is modeling 0.7 g/cm^3 and a particle density of 1.0 g/cm^3. At that point though you pretty much have to say that internal strength is playing a role in holding these things together.

1 comment: