The Physics of Protoplanetesimal Dust Agglomerates. V. Multiple Impacts of Dusty Agglomerates at Velocities Above the Fragmentation Threshold

In the last years, experiments have shown that collisions above the fragmentation threshold velocity are a potentially important growth process for protoplanatary dust aggregates. To obtain deeper understanding of this process, we performed laboratory and drop-tower experiments to study multiple impacts of small, porous dust-aggregate projectiles onto sintered dust targets. Projectile and target consisted of 1.5 micron monodisperse, spherical SiO2 monomers with volume filling factors of 0.15 (projectiles) and 0.45 (targets). The projectiles were accelerated by a solenoid magnet and combined with a magazine with which 25 impacts onto the same spot on the target could be performed in vacuum. We measured the mass-accretion efficiency and the volume filling factor for different impact velocities between 1.5 and 6.0 m/s. The experiments at the lowest impact speeds were performed in the Bremen drop-tower under microgravity conditions. Within this velocity range we found a linear increase of the accretion efficiency with increasing velocity. In the laboratory experiments, the accretion efficiency increases from 0.12 to 0.21 in units of the projectile mass. The recorded images of the impacts showed that the mass transfer from the projectile to the target leads to the growth of a conical structure on the target. From the images we also measured the volume filling factors of the grown structures, which ranged from 0.15 (uncompacted) to 0.40 (significantly compacted) with increasing impact speed. These results augment our knowledge of the aggregate growth in protoplanetary disks and should be taken into account for future models of protoplanetary dust growth.