It is well-known that the takeoff weight of a space operation vehicle is composed mainly of fuel. Payload and vehicle hardware make up only a small percentage of the total weight. As a consequence, an important component of mission design for a space operation vehicle is trajectory planning since mission designers can increase the amount of payload or time-in-orbit by reducing the fuel required to accomplish the mission. In this paper, a method to calculate a fuel-optimal cruise trajectory for a hypersonic space vehicle is presented. The method of direct transcription is used to discretize the state and control variables along the vehicle's flight path to transform the optimization problem into a nonlinear programming problem to find the most fuel-efficient trajectory. Structural constraint in terms of normal loading on the vehicle is imposed along the trajectory. Comparisons are made between the fuel-optimal trajectory and static cruise trajectory.
A fuel-optimal trajectory for a constrained hypersonic vehicle using a direct transcription method
2004 IEEE Aerospace Conference Proceedings (IEEE Cat. No.04TH8720) ; 4 ; 2704-2709 Vol.4
2004-01-01
329412 byte
Conference paper
Electronic Resource
English
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