Propulsive Landing Model Design and Demonstration
For my undergraduate senior capstone design project, a team of six other engineering students and I worked on developing a model capable of a propulsive rocket landing demonstration using a solid rocket motor. My primary tasks on the team were to assist in the development of the landing simulation and control software for the demonstration vehicle, as well as lead the development of the physical design and construction of the vehicle. The initial phase of the vehicle's software development was done in Simulink to visualize the control flow and to ensure stability in the system. This control schema was then ported into C++ to increase efficiency and provide an easier implementation avenue for our microcontroller. The primary design of our physical system was completed in CATIA and analyzed using max load calculations to ensure minimal deflection errors in testing. The design of our final model changed drastically from the original design. The original scope of the project was to create a full 3-Dimensional lander. Due to large time and budget constraints, moving into the second semester the team decided to scale back to a fixed test platform and conduct a hardware-in-the-loop simulation. The final design is shown in the image below:
This would allow us to create a proof of concept of our control system using a real hot-fire motor and a functioning thrust vector control system. Throughout this project, the team and I generated extensive requirements and documentation for our system. We also developed test plans and trade studies to ensure we were meeting the generated system-level and subsystem-level requirements on the vehicle. From this project, I have learned a lot more about budgeting skills, teamwork, and technical document creation. Sadly, due to scheduling difficulties with the firing range at school and allocated running time, we did not have very much time to produce a successful landing demonstration on the test platform. After our final test, we dug back into the code and the data from the final run and believe we found the issue that caused our failure. However, since the semester had ended and everyone was graduating, we were unable to run a final test to validate our assumption.