Abstract
Since atmospheric winds play the most critical natural enviroment (NE) role as input into the design and development of an aerospace launch vehicle, this paper provides a more detailed description of the wind environment and its interaction with engineering design in launch and space vehicle development applications at Kennedy Space Center (KSC).
Highlights
This is the third historical paper which concludes what the previous two papers (Johnson and Vaughan, 2019 and Johnson and Vaughan, 2020) presented, dealing with the subject of the role of the Earth’s terrestrial and space natural environment involvement in launch vehicle design and development.The response of a launch vehicle to wind disturbances is very complicated because the vehicle’s response depends on and interacts with the characteristics of the wind-magnitude, shear, gust, etc., the vehicle dynamics, and the control system.The determination of a launch vehicle’s response to atmospheric disturbances cannot be reduced to the analysis of one discrete set of response criteria, such as vehicle loads, but must include many response parameters dependent upon the vehicle configuration and specific mission
The primary application of wind profile modeling is for establishing dispersions of launch vehicle aerodynamic load indicators
With technological advancements in vehicle design, along with insight in wind modeling, less conservative wind load alleviation techniques based on vector wind profiles were readily incorporated into the design and operation phases of aerospace vehicle systems
Summary
This is the third historical paper which concludes what the previous two papers (Johnson and Vaughan, 2019 and Johnson and Vaughan, 2020) presented, dealing with the subject of the role of the Earth’s terrestrial and space natural environment involvement in launch vehicle design and development. Wind models, wind profiles, and power spectral analyses can be used to simulate wind flow, wind shear, gust, and turbulent effects on a vehicle in flight, while wind monitoring and load relief systems can help alleviate various wind-associated engineering problems in flight. Disturbances represented by a single synthetic (or discrete) wind profile contain several statistical properties of the in-flight wind field (steady-state wind, shear, gust) This older method does not completely define the aerodynamic loads over a large class of vehicle systems once the aerodynamic characteristics are well defined. An improved monthly vector wind profile model was developed in 1992 that is more complete, has no simplifying assumptions, and was proposed for all future launch vehicle development programs (Smith and Adelfang 1998) This enveloping version uses the same approach in defining the given wind vectors on the monthly enveloping probability ellipse at a reference altitude. The recommended model for a particular vehicle must be tailored to meet specific program requirements and vehicle mission objectives in the vehicle development phase
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