Degree thesis of Adriano Arcadipane: "Acrive roll control system for a model rocket: design,...
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This work is a summary of my master's degree thesis in aerospace engineering from Università degli Studi di Palermo (Italy). Rockets spin about their longitudinal axis due to imperfect alignments in construction. This behavior could be a problem for telemetric systems or when guidance control on the other two axes are used. In my thesis I designed, made and tested an automatic control system to negate the angular roll speed of a model rocket. The system uses two control fins (aerodynamic control) moved by a flight computer equipped with a 3DOF gyroscope, an accelerometer and an atmospheric pressure sensor. I entirely scratch built this flight computer: designing the electronics, creating custom printed circuit boards and programming in C language. The code contain also two digital Kalman filters which compute an optimal estimation of the state-space from sensor data. To design the digital controller and to predict the dynamic behavior of the entire rocket I implemented in Matlab / Simulink a 6 degree of freedom mathematical model. All aerodynamic parameters where estimated with real test flight data or with McDonnell Douglas Digital DATCOM Fortran code (a program which uses semi-empirical methods). I also designed and built the solid rocket motor from a commercial combustion chamber, machinging a custom exhaust nozzle.
Transcript of Degree thesis of Adriano Arcadipane: "Acrive roll control system for a model rocket: design,...
