Finite Element Multidisciplinary Simulation of a Reusable Launch Vehicle

Future research into advanced air vehicle designs will benefit from the continued improvement of analysis methods and software tools. A research program is proposed to provide enhanced capabilities to the NASA STARS software package in two key areas. These are; the addition of a control system toolbox including classical and modern control system design procedures, and the introduction of parallelization into the computational process. Since most current and planned high performance air vehicles depend heavily on their flight control systems, and their structure is designed for low weight, and an efficient propulsion system is essential, a fully integrated analysis is required in the design process to produce overall optimized performance. All these factors motivate the need for the newly proposed developments. Also, as more complexity is added to the analysis software, computer throughput productivity inevitably drops, despite computer advances, and this drives the need for parallelization. The capability resulting from this research promises significant increases in the scope and efficiency of STARS such that its use will have a greater range of application and will contribute to the assurance of safety in flight testing. The planned reusable launch vehicle will be the initial application objective of the enhanced software.