The tensile strength of compressed dust samples and the catastrophic disruption threshold of pre-planetary matter

Abstract

During the planetary formation process, mutual collisions among planetesimals take place, making an impact on their porosity evolution. The outcome of these collisions depends, among other parameters, on the tensile strength of the colliding objects. In the first stage of this work, we performed impact experiments into dust samples, assembled with material analogous to that of the primitive Solar System, to obtain highly compressed samples that represent the porosities measured in chondritic meteorites. In the second stage, we obtained the tensile strengths of the compressed dust samples by the Brazilian Disk Test. We found a correlation between the tensile strength and the volume filling factor of the compressed dust samples and obtained the corresponding critical fragmentation strength in mutual collisions and its dependence on the volume filling factor. Finally, we give prescriptions for the catastrophic disruption threshold as a function of the object size, for different values of the volume filling factor that can be utilized in collisional models.

Sticky or not sticky? Measurements of the tensile strength of microgranular organic materials

“…tional to the tensile strength (San Sebastián et al 2020). However, as shown by Gundlach & Blum (2015) with the comparison of silica and water ice, the surface energy is not the only value that determines the sticking or fragmentation strength.…”

Cometary dust analogues for physics experiments

“…𝐹 is the maximum exerted force at break-up, 𝑙 is the thickness of the dust cylinder, and 𝑑 is the diameter of the sample, respectively. This method has been previously used to study protoplanetary and cometary analogues (see Haack et al 2020;Bischoff et al 2020;San Sebastián et al 2020).…”

Formation of Comets

“…Compaction due to collisions or redistribution of volatiles leads to higher tensile strength values. The relation between volume-filling factor and tensile strength has been measured for several materials, such as silica, graphite and organics, and depends strongly on the compaction [67,[212][213][214]. Applying this knowledge to the five types of bodies discussed at the bottom of Figure 1 leads to the conclusion that types A1 and A2 possess low tensile strength on the order of 1 Pa down to the length scale of the pebble size.…”