Micro-spalling is a failure phenomenon consisting in dynamic fragmentation of a material after partial or full melting under intense shock wave loading. High power pulsed lasers are used as shock wave generators in laboratory for scientific and industrial purposes, such as research on inertial confinement fusion. In this context, the production of high velocity fragments can damage the facilities where shock experiments are conducted. This thesis, realized at the P' institute in collaboration with different teams from CEA, aims at understanding and modeling the different processes involved in micro-spalling phenomenon. Experiments to study micro-spalling of laser shock-loaded tin and aluminum targets have been performed in the Laboratoire pour l'Utilisation des Lasers Intenses. Various and complementary diagnostics (photonic Doppler velocimetry, soft recovery of debris and microtomography) have been used to characterize the ballistic properties (size distributions and velocities) of droplets constituting the micro-spalling cloud. In parallel, phase transition and fragmentation models have been adapted to simulate micro-spalling. These models have been implemented in a code to predict the sizes and velocities of debris. The combination of experimental and numerical results allows characterizing the successive stages of micro-spalling from laser-matter interaction to the ejection of droplets.
