Structural requirements and launcher validation process for MECSE CubeSat

• Autor(a) principal: Coelho, Rafael José
• Data de Publicação: 2018
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10400.6/8587
• topic: Cubesat; Ecss; Experimental Verification; Launch Vehicles.; Mechanical Environment; Mecse; Nanosatellite; Numerical Verification; Structural Requirements; Structural Verification; Domínio/Área Científica::Engenharia e Tecnologia::Engenharia Aeronáutica

MECSE is the first CubeSat being developed at UBI - University da Beira Interior, and it is an under development nanosatellite, resulting from the collaboration between C-MAST - Center for Mechanical and Aerospace Science and Technologies and CEiiA - Centre of Engineering and Product Development. MECSE’s mission, aside from the education aims to provide hands-on experience to universitary students in space projects, it intends to demonstrate that is possible the manipulation of plasma layer using an electromagnetic field that will mitigate the RF - Radio Frequency blackout, which occurs when a space vehicle re-enter in the Earth’s Atmosphere. In this dissertation, an overview of the requirements for a structural configuration, design, dimensioning, verification and validation are presented, using several references. Nevertheless, the ECSS - European Cooperation for Space Standardization documents was where the most of the information was consulted, in order to identify and present the requirements from a systems engineering and structural perspective. Therefore, it was initially identified the main structural requirements, such as the mechanical environment, the interconnection between CubeSat and launcher, and the minimum natural frequency required for the satellite structure. Followed by the main structural requirements are the conditions under which the verifications and validations must be performed in a satellite structure. This led to the definition of the verification methods and to the organization, planning and methodology of the verification processes, which are normally used for a CubeSat validation. Knowing that the validation is only granted if the verifications and validation conditions are followed, applied and accomplished in the numerical and experimental verifications, such as for ROD’s - Reviews of Design and inspections. In a final phase of this work, a set of launchers was analysed with the objective of identifying a suitable proposal for MECSE project. The launchers Bloostar, Electron, LauncherOne and Vector-R were the launchers with better performance for the analysed parameters. The analysis of the various launchers was also carried out in order to recognize the most demanding mechanical environment among the cases taken into account, so that MECSE project could be designed and analysed according to the worst case scenario, while the final launcher is not selected. In this same phase a proposal is made for a possible approach to the verification process, with the main focus on the numerical models to be developed, on the experimental test methodology which was defined by a hybrid approach with a structural model, an engineering qualification model and a protoflight model, as well as identified the levels and duration of the tests and analyses to be performed in these same numerical and experimental models.