Laboratory studies of ice-particle collisions in Saturn's dense rings

In this work, we report on microgravity studies of particle ensembles simulating ice-particle collisions in Saturn's dense main rings. We have developed an experimental method to study the energy dissipation in a many-body system consisting of approx. one hundred cm-sized glass spheres. The temporal development of the mean particle velocity, ranging from ~10 cm/s (at the beginning) to ~0.35 cm/s (after 9s of experiment duration), can be explained by a constant coefficient of restitution of 0.64. A comparison to values obtained for pure water-ice bodies shows that future cryogenic ice-collision experiments can achieve collision velocities of ~0.1 cm/s, and thus will very well simulate the conditions in Saturn's main rings.Comment: Accepted by "Proc. Powders and Grains 2009", Publisher AI

Towards a Dynamical Collision Model of Highly Porous Dust Aggregates

In the recent years we have performed various experiments on the collision dynamics of highly porous dust aggregates and although we now have a comprehensive picture of the micromechanics of those aggregates, the macroscopic understanding is still lacking. We are therefore developing a mechanical model to describe dust aggregate collisions with macroscopic parameters like tensile strength, compressive strength and shear strength. For one well defined dust sample material, the tensile and compressive strength were measured in a static experiment and implemented in a Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) code. A laboratory experiment was designed to compare the laboratory results with the results of the SPH simulation. In this experiment, a mm-sized glass bead is dropped into a cm-sized dust aggregate with the previously measured strength parameters. We determine the deceleration of the glass bead by high-speed imaging and the compression of the dust aggregate by x-ray micro-tomography. The measured penetration depth, stopping time and compaction under the glass bead are utilized to calibrate and test the SPH code. We find that the statically measured compressive strength curve is only applicable if we adjust it to the dynamic situation with a 'softness' parameter. After determining this parameter, the SPH code is capable of reproducing experimental results, which have not been used for the calibration before.Comment: Accepted by "Proc. Powders and Grains 2009", Publisher AI

Low-Molecular-Weight Carbon Nitrides for Solar Hydrogen Evolution

This work focuses on the control of the polymerization process for melon (“graphitic carbon nitride”), with the aim of improving its photocatalytic activity intrinsically. We demonstrate here that reduction of the synthesis temperature leads to a mixture of the monomer melem and its higher condensates. We show that this mixture can be separated and provide evidence that the higher condensates are isolated oligomers of melem. On evaluating their photocatalytic activity for hydrogen evolution, the oligomers were found to be the most active species, having up to twice the activity of the monomer/oligomer mixture of the as-synthesized material, which in turn has 3 times the activity of the polymer melon, the literature benchmark. These results highlight the role of “defects”, i.e., chain terminations, in increasing the catalytic activity of carbon nitrides and at the same time point to the ample potential of intrinsically improving the photocatalytic activity of “carbon nitride”, especially through the selective synthesis of the active phase