Active Stabilization: Creation of Our Research Project
Hi everyone, and thank you for reading my awesome blog post. My name is Nelson Ho, and I am the Project Lead for the Active Stabilization Project, and also serve as the launch vehicle team lead. I am currently a senior aerospace engineer major, with an undying passion for rocketry. Throughout my time at college, I have been a part of many rocketry projects and have also led multiple project teams. Now, during my final year I am very honored and excited to take on this new project!
For our project, we wanted to detail the behind the scenes, in order to show that people of all backgrounds can be involved, but also to provide motivation for those who want to go out and start a project, but are unaware as to how. From the beginning of this project, we have thrived to make it interdisciplinary, involving the likes of aerospace, and computer science, to business, and graphic design.
I truly believe that everyone can greatly contribute to research, and this contribution will actually help individuals in their educational and professional lives. In order to achieve this goal, we have started a blog series, to encapsulate the diversity behind the scenes, as well as allow team members to get a chance to showcase the work they have done.
In this post, I will discuss the origins, struggles, current status, as well as what to expect for this project.
The Origins
The origins of this research project came on one of those unexpected days, sitting around a table with my soon-to-be project advisor. That day, many different ideas were thrown around, hoping that one of them would stick long enough to become the basis of my senior project. I debated ideas like spaceshot, to a large scale Saturn V, to somehow getting to a neat active stabilization idea. Like some of the best ideas, this one struck a note, and I took it and ran with it. Before I knew it, I was out searching for motivated and driven individuals to join my vision. I soon found my deputy, Son Kien, and from there we created the baseline for this project and recruited members. All of this was achieved before the spring semester of the 2018–2019 academic school year ended, and I never felt more ready to tackle this project.
When summer break finally arrived, work on our project proposal started speeding up. A project proposal is a document that proposes the project idea, and outlines the steps we plan on taking to make our vision become a reality. Like most projects, the initial idea of the system was heavily debated, tossing and turning, until we could agree on a system. This system first began as a system that would only stabilize a rocket. We decided that with this base, our team could help build it up. Ideas like a cold gas thruster, to canards, to even wings were tossed up, but we finally fell upon forward canards.
Next came the issue of creating unique system. The question I posed to my team was: “Since most generic amateur high powered rockets are stable by nature, why would someone care about what we were doing?”. This question led us back to our drawing boards, and we realized that to make our system unique, we would not only actively stabilize, but would also actively brake and create modular drop-in system. With a clear idea of the system we wanted to design, we now reached the last part: how do we plan to accomplish our goals. Like any research project, our project also underwent so many changes and trade studies in order to get to create a substantial plan, and present it to our advisors. To this day, I am very proud of how the project proposal turned out, even though our system still changes and evolves day by day.
Current Work
Moving on to the present day, much has been accomplished. From flushing out our structural design to calculating the performance of our forward canards, to shoot getting a logo (I learned that day that canard is French for duck) designed. There have been many fun challenges and accomplishments that we had to go through to get to our end goal. One of my best accomplishments as the project manager, was moderating a debate on whether the braking system should be integrated (our original design) or be a separate module. Four people (me being one of them) stepped up to the plate and was given a harsh timeline of 24 hours to get an official answer. Through a bunch of head scratching, cursing, and creative math, we were able to determine that our original design would indeed be functional, and we can actually determine the maximum performance of our braking system. This would greatly reduce the complexity, cost, and length of or system. Those are three key driving factors of our design.
What to Expect
Looking to the future, I anticipate many more challenges, but just as much of an equal amount of accomplishments. Currently, the team is entering the control system design phase, and after this, we begin testing. I hope that reading this blog post has helped you better understand our project, and as I said before, EVERYONE can contribute. If reading this has struck interest in getting involved, there are many ways you can help out, from mentor-ship, donating to our project, to providing manpower to our team. If interested please reach out to the team via facebook, instagram, or our website! Thank you so much for reading.
