[AR] Re: Dynamic stability in supersonic rockets

  • From: Mike Caplinger <mc@xxxxxxxx>
  • To: arocket@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Tue, 16 Nov 2021 08:41:02 -0800

On 11/16/21 8:30 AM, William Claybaugh wrote:

Looking at your posted image and your description, I would first guess that the rocket had a structural failure just above the motor which failure proceeded first as an offset of the top of the rocket wrt to bottom

I've had a number of structural failures ("shreds" in HPR parlance) in this exact area on extreme flights.  Obviously it's a weak point, but it's never been clear to me if it was the root cause of the shred or an effect of instability.  I also usually see a slow ramp-up in lateral acceleration (the Raven has a two-axis accelerometer with the lateral normal to the velocity vector) right before the shred which is not consistent with a lot of coning, but I've never had three-axis orientation data on these flights.

I looked at an aeroelastic resonance as a possible cause but it didn't seem like a viable hypothesis.


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