Rocket Sim

[MisterQED]

One of the topics I've been working on is developing a good open
source rocket to orbit sim. It's always nice to know if this even has
a shot at working. :-)

And today there was a post on arocket that is still limited but maybe
interesting for some people here.

MisterQED
Team Daedalus

[AR] OpenRocket simulation software
Sampo Niskanen spniskan at cc.hut.fi
Sat Jun 27 03:54:55 PDT 2009

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Hi,

A year and a half ago I started a hobby project of writing a model
rocket
simulator, which later turned into my Master's thesis project. I've
now
released the first versions of the project as open source at
http://openrocket.sourceforge.net/

The software tries to take the best features of Rocksim and enhance
on
those. It includes CG/CP and drag estimation in addition to a
6-degree-of-freedom flight simulation. It's written in Java so it
runs on
practically any modern system.

The emphasis has currently been on subsonic and transonic velocities.
The calculated values are reasonably accurate up to about Mach 1.5,
but
above that they get gradually worse. The methods are fully documented
in
the thesis, which is available on the site (under Documentation). If
somebody has experience with shock expansion methods, help would be
greatly appreciated to make the supersonic estimation better.

Extensibility has also been a priority when designing the software.
It
would be reasonably easy to add other calculation methods to the
software,
for example CFD or if the methods used by RASAero were available.

One feature that may be of intrest to more advanced rocketeers is the
possibility to listen to and interact with the simulations while they
are
being run. For example, we've been designing an active roll
reduction
system to our next hybrid rocket, which controls two auxillary fins
to
remove any roll on the rocket. I first implemented the control
software
in Java, and later connected the actual Arduino flight computer to
the
simulation using the serial link. The simulator feeds the flight
information to the controller, which provides the control actions back
to
the simulation and modifies the fin cant angle during the simulated
flight.

I hope that the software may be of use, even if the scope is a bit
limited
for many aRocket readers.

--
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