Multidisciplinary Design Under Uncertainty for Entry Vehicles, Phase I

The physical difficulty of designing entry vehicles originates from the large degree of coupling between the various disciplines involved in the design. Every subsystem design decision has far reaching consequences that must be evaluated in a multidisciplinary fashion in order to assess the impact on the weight and the performance of the entire vehicle. The disciplines which must be accounted and integrated during the design are: trajectory optimization, guidance, navigation, and control (GN&C) technology, aerodynamics and aerothermodynamics, thermal-structural analysis, and thermal protection system (TPS) development. Previous efforts in developing a collaborative or a multidisciplinary optimization process never considered how uncertainty in the atmospheric conditions, in the entry parameters of the vehicle, in the condition of the vehicle during entry, and in the performance of the TPS will influence the design and provide a risk assessment for a mission. The proposed project will fill this void by developing a tool for multidisciplinary optimization under uncertainty (MDO-U) for entry vehicle design. The proposed development will consider how uncertainties influence the modeling results of each discipline, and how uncertainties influence the interaction between disciplines and the optimal solution. Finally, the new MDO-U design tool will compute the safety level for the optimum design. More »