In-Flight Prediction of Solid Rocket Motor Performance for Flight Control

Abstract

In this paper, an in-flight prediction method of thrust profiles for solid rocket motors is proposed. Actually, it is very difficult to have detailed information about the performance of the rocket motors beforehand because it is quite sensitive to combustion environments. To overcome this problem, we have developed an algorithm for generating in-flight prediction of rocket motor performance in realistic environments via a reference burnback profile and accelerations measured at a short time-interval just after launch. The performance is evaluated through a lot of flight test results.