Impact Resistance of Ceramic Fiber Insulation Tiles and Surface Coatings: A Coupled Numerical and Experimental Analysis

Ceramic fiber insulation tile (CFIT) and surface coating play a vital role in the thermal protection system of spacecraft. As brittle materials, they are subjected to particle impacts during the takeoff/landing of spacecraft, as well as impact loads during installation. To investigate the ability of CFITs to resist low-energy impacts during installation and takeoff/landing of spacecraft, a user-defined subroutine (VUMAT) was developed from a UMAT to incorporate of energy evolution and damage updates, and was implemented in ABAQUS/Explicit. First, the finite element and experimental methods are employed to investigate impact on the CFIT, thereby validating the accuracy of VUMAT. Meanwhile, the penetration depth-angle and load-displacement curves are obtained at different impact angles. Besides, this work also focuses on the impact behavior of the CFIT with borosilicate glass coating. The results demonstrate that the coating can improve the impact resistance of CFIT, and the application thickness of the coating is predicted. The simulation results from this work can provide a theoretical reference for CFIT’s low-energy impact behavior, and provide a theoretical basis for subsequent research on high-speed impact behavior.