Numerical Simulation of Neutral Buoyancy Experiment for Spacecraft

DOI

10.2991/fmsmt-17.2017.151How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Spacecraft; Neutral buoyancy; Computational Fluid Dynamics; Hydrodynamic coefficients

Abstract

With the success of Shenzhou spacecraft rendezvous and docking with Tiangong-1 and Tiangong-2, the future tasks of the space station such as space garbage clean-up requires the control of spacecraft attitude to be more and more accurate. Because of the high cost of the attitude control and regulation test in space, the experiments are usually carried out on the ground. In order to simulate the microgravity environment of space, the gravity of the aircraft model is needed to be overcame in the ground test. Presently, there are two ways that not only overcome the gravity of the aircraft model but also make the aircraft to freedom of movement: one is to use non-contact force to overcome the gravity, such as electromagnetic force, but this approach requires the control of non-contact force to be very accurate, which needs difficult technology and faces the high cost; another way is to use liquid buoyancy to overcome gravity, which only needs to ensure that the average density of the aircraft model is equal to the density of the liquid, and the aircraft model can be suspended at any position in the liquid, using the thrust produced by the propeller to carry out the free movement. This technique is not difficult and low cost, but in the control of aircraft model movement needs to overcome the force and torque generated by the liquid. Therefore, the buoyancy of water is used to overcome the gravity of the vehicle model, and a neutral buoyancy force is obtained. Then the numerical analysis technique is used to calculate the hydrodynamic coefficient of the model. At the same time, by changing the propeller thrust, the response curves of aircraft moving in vertical and horizontal directions are simulated and verified. The results show that the model can reach a new equilibrium state in 0.8~1 seconds. This paper provides a theoretical basis for guiding the tunnel test of aircraft model, which is one of the important links in the iterative design of space vehicles.

Copyright

© 2017, the Authors. Published by Atlantis Press.

Open Access

This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Shuhan Liu
AU  - Zhanxia Zhu
PY  - 2017/04
DA  - 2017/04
TI  - Numerical Simulation of Neutral Buoyancy Experiment for Spacecraft
BT  - Proceedings of the 2017 5th International Conference on Frontiers of Manufacturing Science and Measuring Technology (FMSMT 2017)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 779
EP  - 787
SN  - 2352-5401
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/fmsmt-17.2017.151
DO  - 10.2991/fmsmt-17.2017.151
ID  - Liu2017/04
ER  -