Solid rocket motors (SRMs) are an integral part of human space flight providing a reliable means of breaking away from the Earth's gravitational pull. The development and deployment of an integrated system health management (ISHM) approach for the SRMs is therefore a prerequisite for the safe exploration of space with the next-generation Crew and Heavy-Lift Launch Vehicles. This unique innovative technological effort is an essential part of the novel safety strategy adopted by NASA. At the core of an on-board ISHM approach for SRMs are the real-time failure detection and prognostics (FDP (iv) recovery from many of the failure modes is impossible, with the only available resource being a limited thrust vector control authority (TVC); (iii) the safe time window between the detectable onset of a fault and a possible catastrophic failure is very short (typically a few seconds). The overarching goal of SRM FD&P is to extract an information from available data with precise timing and a highest reliability with no “misses” and no “false alarms”. In order to achieve this goal in the face of sparse data and short event horizons, we are developing: (i) effective models of nominal and off-nominal SRM operation, learned from high-fidelity simulations and firing tests and (ii) a Bayesian sensor-fusion framework for estimating and tracking the state of a nonlinear stochastic dynamical system. We expect that the combination of these two capabilities will enable in-flight (real time) FD&P.
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CITATION STYLE
Luchinsky, D. G., Osipov, V. V., Smelyanskiy, V. N., Kulikov, I., Patterson-Hein, A., Hayashida, B., … Shipley, J. (2010). Integrated Vehicle Health Management for Solid Rocket Motors. In Aerospace Technologies Advancements. InTech. https://doi.org/10.5772/6929