Design of Launch Vehicle Flight Control Systems Using Ascent Vehicle Stability Analysis Tool
A launch vehicle represents a complicated flex-body structural environment for flight control system design. The Ascent-vehicle Stability Analysis Tool (ASAT) is developed to address the complicity in design and analysis of a launch vehicle. The design objective for the flight control system of a launch vehicle is to best follow guidance commands while robustly maintaining system stability. A constrained optimization approach takes the advantage of modern computational control techniques to simultaneously design multiple control systems in compliance with required design specs. “Tower Clearance” and “Load Relief” designs have been achieved for liftoff and max dynamic pressure flight regions, respectively, in the presence of large wind disturbances. The robustness of the flight control system designs has been verified in the frequency domain Monte Carlo analysis using ASAT.
Robust steering control of spacecraft carrier rockets
In the year of 2003 it was established a cooperation agreement between Ukraine and Brazil for utilization of Cyclone-4 launch vehicle at Alcantara Launch Center. The company responsible for the marketing and operation of launch services is the company bi-national Alcantara Cyclone Space (ACS). The Cyclone-4 launch vehicle is the newest version of the Ukrainian Cyclone family launchers developed by Yuzhnoye State Design Office. This family has been used for many successful spacecrafts launches since 1969. This paper is concerned with the yaw stabilization problem around a nominal trajectory for the third stage of a satellite carrier rocket similar to the Cyclone-4. Only the steering machine of the main engine is considered as actuator. The dynamic behavior of the third stage around the nominal trajectory is modeled as a fourthorder time-varying linear system whereas the steering machine is modeled as a linear dynamical system up to third order. The values of the parameters of the steering machine model are unknown, however belonging to known intervals. As the main result, the stabilization problem is solved with a proportional derivative (PD) controller. The proposed tuning approach takes into account the robustness of the controller with respect to the steering machine model uncertainties. The performance of the PD controller is demonstrated by simulation results.
APPLICATION OF SATELLITE PHOTOGRAPHS IN A MORPHOTECTONIC STUDY OF THE CENTRAL ALBORZ, IRAN
This paper introduces a study of morphotectoni c structure in the Central Alborz Basin, Mazandaran province of Iran (about 1200 square kilometer), using Russian KFA-1000 satellite photography and sequential air photographs. The KFA-1000 metric camera has better ground resolution than SPOT and LANDSAT for the whole of the study area. Results are provided from one pair of 30×30 cm. photos, which provided easy interpretation and better results than other data. Areas identified from these images as being of significance were examined in greater detail through the use of aerial photographs (at scales of 1:5000, 1:10000 and 1:60000 were available).