Date of Award:

8-2023

Document Type:

Dissertation

Degree Name:

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department:

Physics

Committee Chair(s)

J. R. Dennison

Committee

J. R. Dennison

Committee

Mark Riffe

Committee

Charles Torre

Committee

Lee Pearson

Committee

Yi Rao

Abstract

Understanding how charge builds up and moves around in materials that are highly insulating, such as dielectrics, is important for many applications from power transmission to spacecraft charging. The leading cause of issues in spacecraft due to interactions with the space environment is spacecraft charging. That is, the accumulation of charge on insulating materials leads to arcing and sparking aboard the spacecraft. The most critical charging occurs due to electrons in a particular energy range of 10-50 keV. Electrons with these energies can travel 1’s to 10’s of microns into relevant materials. To measure where the charge is embedded and how it moves, the pulsed electroacoustic (PEA) method can be used. The PEA method allows for non-destructive measurements of embedded charge distributions in these dielectric materials. PEA instrumentation, test methods, and analysis were extensively characterized and improved. In this work, the PEA method was tested as to its relevance to spacecraft charging applications and the applicability was extended with a novel method for measuring shallowly deposited charge distributions in highly insulating materials. The PEA method is shown to be relevant and useful for understanding how charge builds up and moves inside dielectric materials in the context of spacecraft charging.

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