Parametric study of guidance of a 160-mm projectile steered with lateral thrusters

Abstract

The development of projectile guidance requires consideration of a large number of possible flight scenarios with various system parameters. In this paper, the Monte-Carlo parametric study for a 160 mm artillery rocket equipped with a set of 34 small, solid propellant lateral thrusters located before the center of mass was evaluated to reduce projectile dispersion and collateral damage. The novelty of this paper lies in the functionality of modifying the shape of the trajectory in the terminal phase using lateral thrusters only. A six degree of freedom mathematical model implemented in MATLAB/Simulink was used to investigate the influence of numerous parameters on the resulting accuracy at several launch elevation angles. Augmented impact point prediction guidance was applied in the descending portion of the flight trajectory to achieve the trajectory shaping functionality. The optimum combination of thruster magnitude and algorithm parameters was obtained. The real data from the LN200 inertial measurement unit were used to investigate the influence of noise on the resulting accuracy. It was shown that with the proposed guidance method, the dispersion could be reduced by more than 250 times and the projectile impact angle might be increased when compared to an unguided projectile.