Control Effectiveness of Wing with Elevon of a Typical Reusable Launch Vehicle

Modern aircraft structures uses more lightweight materials such as composites for their design. This makes the aeroelastic study an extremely important aspect of aircraft design. By having more light weight control surfaces, the control effectiveness study becomes vital in today’s scenario. Control effectiveness is the ability of a control surface such as an aileron or a rudder to produce aerodynamic forces and moments to change the airplane orientation and manoeuvre it along the intended flight path. This paper presents the static aeroelastic analysis of a typical reusable launch vehicle focusing on control effectiveness of elevon. A Reusable Launch Vehicle (RLV) is the space analogy of an aircraft. Ideally it takes off vertically on the back of a dispensable rocket and then glides back down like an aircraft. MSC PATRAN and MSC NASTRAN were the software’s used for Finite Element Modeling and Analysis. The main aim of the analysis is to compute the control effectiveness of launch vehicle along its trajectory to determine whether it is efficient to control the vehicle. The objectives of this work are, to study the control surface effectiveness of elevon by carrying out static aeroelastic analysis using NASTRAN inbuilt aerodynamics, for a typical Reusable Launch Vehicle (RLV).