Microparticle Ejection and Electromagnetic Scattering in the SCRAP Experiment

• Main Author: Persson, Linnea
• Format: Others
• Language: English
• Published: KTH, Skolan för teknikvetenskap (SCI) 2014
• Online Access: http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:kth:diva-153910

This Bachelor Thesis is done within the project SCRAP (SCattering of Radar Waves on Aerosols in Plasmas), which aims to investigate the role of microparticles in the mesosphere. A sounding rocket is to be launched in spring of 2015 containing the experiment. The rocket will eject two free falling units (FFUs) which each subsequently releases a cloud of conductive microparticles into the mesosphere. The particle cloud will interact with the surrounding plasma and can thereafter be observed indirectly by using radar backscattering. In this project two different aspects of the microparticles have been studied. The first one is the way electromagnetic radiation is scattered on them, where known solutions to simplified versions of the problem are adapted in a simple computer program. The second part deals with the particle release mechanism for the FFU. Three different release techniques have been evaluated mainly on the amount of particle agglomeration caused by the releasing. The results show that the method called gunpowder approach has advantages over the others in a number of ways, including the particle dust capacity and the particle separation.