Frequency-modulated pulse-jet control of an artillery rocket

Abstract

Long- and medium-range artillery rockets are used for indirect fire on distant targets. As they have a large impactpoint dispersion, they are considered to be area weapons. Nevertheless, a control system is required in order to reduce the dispersion and increase hit probability. The pulse-jet control system is simple and efficient enough to produce acceptable impact-point dispersion. However, it is necessary to perform an optimization of the control logic in order to obtain a satisfactory performance with the minimum number and intensity of control pulses. A new two-phase guidance scheme named trajectory tracking with pulse-frequency modulation is presented, considering the fact that an artillery rocket flies through different atmospheric environments. Simulation studies have been conducted in order to perform parametric and performance analyses. It is shown that the presented guidance scheme achieves excellent accuracy even in the case of a small number of pulse jets. In the case of a large number, it tends to nullify the impact-point dispersion. It is also shown that in comparison with the window-based trajectory-Tracking guidance, the proposed method achieves significantly better results. Copyright © 2011 by Serhat Hosder.