Laser Propulsion in Confinement Regime: The Role of Film Thickness in the Impulse Generation Process

A small amount of mass is generally ejected with high exhaust velocities from the surface of materials irradiated by intense laser pulses, so that a net impulse is generated on the target because of momentum conservation. This phenomenon proved to be a potential solution to generate thrust on far objects, with promising application in space debris removal and control of nanosatellites. Among the different tested strategies, the deposition on the surface of the target of a layer transparent to laser radiation results in a considerable increase in the generated impulse, due to the confinement of the expansion of the ablation plume. In this work impulse generation was measured, using aluminum as target, and PVC, SiO2, TiO2 and CNCs (cellulose nanocrystals) as confinement layers with thickness 0.3∼5 μm. The results show that the generated impulses increase with the thickness of the ejected confinement layer. Additionally, the kinetic energy of the confinement layer, for a given material, does not depend on its thickness, but it is affected by the energy dissipation paths during the interaction with the laser pulse, where the strength of substrate–film adhesion and the Young’s modulus of the latter are shown to play an important role.