Felix Ebert

TUM

Tuesday, January 21, 2025, 11:00 - 11:45

SYSCOP Meeting Space

Landing a launcher stage on earth or space vehicles on celestial bodies such as Mars requires precise thrust control over a wide operational range while minimizing propellant consumption. Optimal control algorithms are a promising approach to rocket engine thrust control, particularly because they allow to satisfy constraints such as mass flow ratios, thereby ensuring the integrity of the propulsion system.

Fundamentally, thrust control breaks down to regulating mass flows or pressures within the engine's fluidic system. Lumped parameter modelling (LPM) is employed to represent the engine dynamics as a system of ordinary differential equations. The nature of the engine dynamics requires to analyse and select an appropriate time discretization scheme and rescaling decision variables to address disparities in magnitude across the system states to be embedded into an optimal control framework.

To test the engine control algorithm, a free-flying rocket hopper platform is currently under development at the Chair of Space Mobility and Propulsion at TU Munich. CasADi in combination with model-based-design is used to generate system design candidates and analyse the engine’s thermal behaviour.