Aerospace engineering

DANIELE BIANCHI

The optional course of the third year of the three-year degree in Aerospace Engineering (BAER) is designed to provide the student with knowledge and skills not currently provided for in the bachelor's and master's degrees. The current training offer is oriented towards training in the field of propulsion systems and other subsystems but there are no courses dedicated to the study of the launcher system. The course therefore provides an exhaustive overview of launch systems, aimed above all at understanding the process that defines the architectural choices and how these are governed by the choice of subsystems, passing through the study of the operating environment and the main physical processes involved. The launcher system is therefore not studied as the sum of its parts but, rather, as a multidisciplinary integrated design problem capable of stimulating the student towards a flexible and versatile use of the knowledge acquired in the field of aerospace propulsion.
The course program will be divided into the following topics:
History and development of launch systems, reusable and non-reusable launch systems, overview of existing launch systems; Ground launch systems vs air-launched systems; State of the art and problems of launch systems; Costs/benefits of launch base location.
Definition of launcher requirements and mission design; Dynamic, thermal, and acoustic loads on the launcher in the various flight phases; Aerothermodynamics of the launcher. Staging, tandem, parallel, and mixed architectures; design criteria for choosing staging and number of stages; Launcher performance curves (e.g., payload mass vs realized ∆V as a function of orbital parameters); Optimal distribution of ∆V as a function of the structural and propulsive efficiencies of the stages; Sensitivity analysis of propulsive and structural parameters on the launcher architecture. Recall of the concepts of velocity losses (gravitational, aerodynamic, and misalignment) and qualitative evaluation of their impact on the launcher's design choices.
Preliminary design of the launcher: integrated design aspects; architectural choices (number of stages and type of staging); dimensions and weights of the main components and subcomponents of the launcher, such as tanks, interstages, intertanks, fairings, fuel systems, turbomachinery, on-board avionics, control systems (thrust vectoring, jet vanes, jet injection, aerodynamic controls); Thermal protection systems; cost engineering analysis.

The Launch Systems course is structured according to the following descriptors of the skills that students will acquire.
Knowledge and understanding:
• Know how to evaluate the state of the art of launch systems, know recent and future technological developments and understand the current market landscape.
• Understand the fundamental principles of the integrated design of a launcher starting from the constraints represented by the mission and the general sizing, passing through the general system layout, the sizing of the masses and volumes of the main subsystems, the preliminary verification of the performances and the final integration of the launcher.
• Know how to critically evaluate the issues associated with the design of a launcher, including environmental impact, costs, reliability, and risk analysis.

Ability to apply knowledge:
• Know how to apply the methodologies acquired for the preliminary sizing of a launcher.
• Know how to develop simple calculation codes (e.g., Matlab) for sizing and calculating launcher performance.

Autonomy and responsibility:
• Know how to critically evaluate the advantages/disadvantages of different launch systems and the technologies associated with them.
• Know how to interact and collaborate in an interdisciplinary manner between groups of students with different tasks, in order to complete the integrated project of a launcher.

Communication Skills:
• Know how to produce detailed and coherent technical documents containing data, analysis results, descriptions of systems and subsystems inherent to the design of a launcher.

Lifelong learning skills:
• Acquire sufficient fundamentals of analysis and design of launch systems to allow both the continuous learning of coherent and similar topics, and the development of a decision-making process capable of efficiently complementing the student's career in aerospace engineering.