Achievements and status: 

• Both cylinders have been manufactured up to spec and shipped to the end-user. 
• Both cylinders have been accepted by the end-user

Benefits: 

• Tailored lattice design parameters to optimise the design for the defined load cases. 
• Mass savings in comparison to traditional monolithic designs of around 50% (of the composite part, without mounted equipment)

The growth of the human population, industrialization of developing countries and rising living standards for the population are continuously increasing global energy demand, that in the next 30 years is forecast to double.

Activity addresses the necessity of developing a competitive European Sep

The AERODEM is an ESA demonstration mission that will implement an aerocapture phase in order to provide an atmospheric ∆V instead of a standard chemical one for orbiting a SpaceCraft around Mars. The aerocapture technique currently studied relies on a discrete event drag modulation technique that modifies only once the aerocapture module ballistic coefficient by separating / retracting the heatshield.

Distributed optical fibre sensors (DOFS) are highly suitable for monitoring temperature, vibration and strain using physical principles such as Raman, Rayleigh and Brillouin backscatter. They convert a standard telecom infrastructure to a sensor network providing thousands of virtual sensors per km using the intrinsic light/glass interaction during propagation.

Classical control design techniques used for flexible spacecraft are based on single axis design approaches to control the rigid-body motion complemented by low-pass and notch filters to suppress the resonant peaks of the low-frequency flexible modes. These techniques are inherently relying on a priori knowledge of the structural flexible modes and introduce significant conservatism in the control and structural design, dictated by the need to separate the controller bandwidth from the flexible modes frequency.

The production process of full-CFRP struts, was before only suitable for low volume production rates (~10 struts/month) and including worker safety critical processes. This approach had to be reviewed and changed to enable production rates >100/month and improve worker safety. The activity focused on the: