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I'm at the beginning of some research involving the simulation of space-debris cascades. I understand the various different forces and perturbations that I'm going to be required to account for to propagate these objects through space.

However, I have no idea how to go about modelling such high-speed collisions.

I've seen approaches for collisions on a planetary scale that assume the two objects are merely made up of many particles interacting purely gravitationally, indicating that frictional forces are somewhat negligible in such a scenario. However, given the objects that I'd be working with are on the order of 10-10000kgs, I don't think that's a viable approach.

There are many papers that seem to gloss over this part of their research, so I assume there's some reasonably standard approach to this, I just can't seem to find it...

So, what approaches are there for modelling the outcome of two objects destructively colliding at tens of kilometres per second?

Ideally, I want to be able to specify the mass, shape, and velocity of the input objects, and then get a list of the mass, shape, and velocity of the resulting debris.

Note: I'm not looking for you to give me an exact algorithm, that would be way too much work. More to suggest viable approaches on which I can build (similar to the example I've given), and maybe what the limitations of each approach are.

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    $\begingroup$ What are your simplifying assumptions? On its face this seems like a life's work for a whole team of experts, starting from the hard-earned results of multiple other whole teams of experts... $\endgroup$
    – g s
    Commented Feb 12, 2023 at 4:07
  • $\begingroup$ Well, that’s part of the question, if you take my example, the whole thing is simplified by assuming that gravity is the only non-negligible force and treating the planet as a bunch of individual particles. Can you do something similar for smaller objects and assume that they’re a bunch of particles held together by XYZ instead? I’m assuming there are some fairly well-understood approaches to this because there are lots of papers that just completely gloss over how they modelled the actual collisions $\endgroup$
    – ScottishTapWater
    Commented Feb 12, 2023 at 13:33
  • $\begingroup$ During the collision, some energy is absorbed deforming the parts and shearing material off which causes heat. So the effects can be glossed over when considering inelastic collisions as energy is lost with these conditions. $\endgroup$
    – John Alexiou
    Commented Feb 14, 2023 at 19:18
  • $\begingroup$ If you look at some high-speed collision videos on youtube you will realize that the resulting projectiles cannot be analytically predicted but stochastically. There is just too much chaos entropy introduced to know excactly what is going to happen. $\endgroup$
    – John Alexiou
    Commented Feb 14, 2023 at 19:20

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