Mathematical/Statistical Technique to Estimate Maximum Aerospace Vehicle Response to Wind

摘要

The statistical distribution of the maximum (per flight) resultant bending moment of an aerospace vehicle can be acquired in a 'brute-force' manner from calculations of level-by-level bending moments during computer-simulated launchings through a representative sample of individual wind soundings. This distribution resembles, closely, the 'Gumbel' distribution. Calculated risk design philosophy in which the probability of failure is specified can be applied to this distribution to arrive at a final design configuration. To avoid extensive computer efforts required by this 'brute-force' approach, the statistics of wind, interlevel covariances of and between wind components and wind shear components are used in connection with dynamical equations to compute the statistics of bending moment response in a single computer run. The parameters determined from these statistics for the distribution of maximum resulting bending moment per flight agree closely with those determined from the individual wind sounding method. Several other methods of treating the problem are discussed in view of simplification for the work and shortening the computations. (Author)