Design and Analysis of Advanced Materials in a Thermal/Acoustic Environment. Delivery Order 0007: Volume 2-Risk-Minimized Structural Design and Assessment for Reusable Launch Vehicles (RLVs)

摘要

Reusable launch vehicle (RLV) design is an inherently nonlinear, multi physics-based problem involving continuous, mixed, and integer optimization variables. With the wide presence of randomness in these variables, including epistemic, aleatory, and model-form uncertainties,, uncertainty in the problem must be accounted for in order to accurately quantify the system's probability of success. This research provides valuable tools to the RLV community by incorporating risk-minimization into the design of a vehicle. This has been accomplished by incorporating uncertainty quantification related to the aeroelastic and structural integrity of a launch vehicle, with a focus on flutter uncertainties.