In 2004, the NASA Astronaut Office produced a memo regarding the safety of next generation launch vehicles. The memo requested that these vehicles have a probability of loss of crew of at most 1 in 1000 flights, which represents nearly an order of magnitude decrease from current vehicles. The goal of LOC of 1 in 1000 flights has since been adopted by the launch vehicle design community as a requirement for the safety of future vehicles. This research addresses the gap between current vehicles and future goals by improving the capture of vehicle architecture effects on reliability and safety.
Vehicle architecture pertains to the physical description of the vehicle itself, which includes manned or unmanned, number of stages, number of engines per stage, engine cycle types, redundancy, etc. During the operations phase of the vehicle life-cycle it is clear that each of these parameters will have an inherent effect on the reliability and safety of the vehicle. However, the vehicle architecture is typically determined during the early conceptual design phase when a baseline vehicle is selected. Unless a great amount of money and effort is spent, the architecture will remain relatively constant from conceptual design through operations. Due to the fact that the vehicle architecture is essentially “locked-in” during early design, it is expected that much of the vehicle's reliability potential will also be locked-in.
This observation leads to the conclusion that improvement of vehicle reliability and safety in the area of vehicle architecture must be completed during early design. Evaluation of the effects of different architecture decisions must be performed prior to baseline selection, which helps to identify a vehicle that is most likely to meet the reliability and safety requirements when it reaches operations. Although methods exist for evaluating reliability and safety during early design, weaknesses exist when trying to evaluate all architecture effects simultaneously.
The goal of this research was therefore to formulate and implement a method that is capable of quantitatively evaluating vehicle architecture effects on reliability and safety during early conceptual design. The ConcepTual Reliability Growth Approach for CompariSon of Launch Vehicle ArchiTectures (CONTRAST) was developed to meet this goal. Using the strengths of existing techniques a hybrid approach was developed, which utilizes a reliability growth projection to evaluate the vehicles. The growth models are first applied at the subsystem level and then a vehicle level projection is generated using a simple system level fault tree. This approach allows for the capture of all trades of interest at the subsystem level as well as many possible trades at the assembly level.
The CONTRAST method is first tested on an example problem, which compares the method output to actual data from the Space Transportation System (STS). This example problem illustrates the ability of the CONTRAST method to capture reliability growth trends seen during vehicle operations. It also serves as a validation for the development of the reliability growth model assumptions for future applications of the method.
The final chapter of the thesis applies the CONTRAST method to a relevant launch vehicle, the Space Launch System (SLS), which is currently under development.
Within the application problem, the output of the method is first used to check that the primary research objective has been met. Next, the output is compared to a state-of-the-art tool in order to demonstrate the ability of the CONTRAST method to alleviate one of the primary consequences of using existing techniques. The final section within this chapter presents an analysis of the booster and upper stage block upgrade options for the SLS vehicle. A study of the upgrade options was carried out because the CONTRAST method is uniquely suited to look at the effects of such strategies. The results from the study of SLS block upgrades give interesting observations regarding the desired development order and upgrade strategy. Ultimately this application problem demonstrates the merits of applying the CONTRAST method during early design. This approach provides the designer with more information in regard to the expected reliability of the vehicle, which will ultimately enable the selection of a vehicle baseline that is most likely to meet the future requirements.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:GATECH/oai:smartech.gatech.edu:1853/53095 |
| Date | 12 January 2015 |
| Creators | Zwack, Mathew R. |
| Contributors | Mavris, Dimitri |
| Publisher | Georgia Institute of Technology |
| Source Sets | Georgia Tech Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Archive |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Dissertation |
| Format | application/pdf |
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