A novel non-separation opening scheme of front cover for rocket launch canister

Abstract

In view of that existing opening technologies of front cover for rocket launch canister have disadvantages such as causing damage on the ground equipment, not being reused and easily broken. A novel reusable non-separation spring-driven opening scheme is proposed to achieve rapid and reliable opening of the front cover. The mathematical model of the opening process of the front cover is established by the rigid body dynamics theory. To establish a response surface model to optimize the opening scheme, three main influencing factors of the opening process are obtained through the designed experiments, including the pre-compression, the stiffness of the thrust spring, and the thrust spring force arm length. In addition, the prescribed kinematic law was taken as constraint, and the smaller thrust spring preliminary pressure and angular velocity was taken as optimization expectations. The results show that the opening scheme meets the design requirements on opening process well. It also shows that the optimized scheme can reduce the kinetic energy of the front cover, and the impact on the canister effectively, achieving a reliable and rapid opening of the front cover. Keywords: Canister covers, Spring-driven, Non-separation, Optimized opening scheme, Rocket launch canisters, Launch safety