CEV Revolutionary Gimballed Thrusters

simonbp writes "A Tennessee Tech Professor has proposed an innovative gimbal mount for 'inclusion to the design of [NASA's] CEV (Crew Exploration Vehicle), revolutionizing the vehicle's RCS (Reaction Control System) and solar panel orientation capabilities.' This will allow for nimble maneuvering and for the solar cells to maximize power production."

Comments

Re:What's the symbol?

[ScrewMaster]

I dunno ... but it fits in a thimble. I think a guy named Kimball invented the nimble gymbal that fits in a thimble, and I believe he lives on the ice shelf Fimbul and plays the cymbal.

Design is a disaster

[O2H2]

The design is interesting in a sophomoric way. It is clearly designed by someone who has never had to qualify a device for spaceflight. Highly cantilevered, indeterminate stuctures with eccentric centroids and active mechanisms in the loads paths are terrible. I would give that thing about 60 seconds on a vibe table before it came to pieces. The use of flex hoses with such large motions is also a really bad idea- expecially when they have to flex in multiple axes at once- there is no practical solution to make such a fluid connection last more than a few thousand cycles under cryogenic conditions under the 300 psig pressure conditions that are planned for CEV propulsion. As someone who DOES design such things on a daily basis I give it a D- for practicality, cost and reliability/redundancy.

Also the control valving is highly decoupled from the combustion chamber which means high dribble volume and terrible min Ibit. Those simple stepper motors also have to operate at 165R for prolonged periods- this denies you most lubricants and requires special resolvers and the like. There is also no way that such a mechanism can deliver the frequency response of multiple small thrusters pointed in multiple directions. There is also the need to interface either a fiber optic or high voltage spark igniter lead to the thruster across large motions- could be a problem for the non-optical approach.

The issue is : just what problem are we trying to solve? is it cost of the combustion chamber? Number of valves? Weight? Overall complexity? Or is this just an interesting exercise for a kinematics class? The vehicle attitude control function can be performed two active and two standby modules- not four fully active as was used on Apollo. This is highly optimal for cryogenic thrusters since it minimizes the number of lines which must be chilled and pure 6 DOF operations are rare as opposed to simple maneuvers with coupled rotations and translations. This solution was proposed to NASA and rejected as being "just too different from what Apollo did". I cannot imagine them actually flying this contraption.