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This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon Europe programme under grant agreement No 101082326
To achieve the objectives identified in the project, a set of dedicated technical activities have been settled-up
Laser Ignition System – The team will develop a multiplexing technology enabling drastic reduction of laser ignition technology cost applied on the combustion systems of one engine (i.e. thrust chamber and gas- generator) and for multiple engines on a multiengine propulsion bay. The principle relies on the use of a single laser source and electronic bay distributed to multiple ignition points, by division of laser signal using optical multiplexing. The complexity of the system lies on the one hand in the high peak power of the laser pulses required for ignition near the damage threshold of the components necessary for optical distribution and secondly in the required operation of the system under the harsh engine environmental conditions.
Regulation Valves – Objective is to develop a regulation valve based on an electrical actuator immersed in the propellants. This concept will make possible important cost and mass reductions, including removing secondary sealing, an important factor of reliability for reusable applications. The concept proposed shows an important potential in terms of regulation capability thanks to the linear stroke principal.
Single Element Nozzle Extension – Developing a nozzle extension technology based on single material 3D printing production process is the target. A key element of the application of single material 3D printing process will be the thermo-mechanical design of nozzle extension compliant with the very severe thrust chamber environment including very high temperature gasses, and the design of the internal cooling system. The targeted technology will be investigated and assessed regarding material selection and feasibility assessment. Configuration studies and design definition will be carried out including specialistic analyses to support design activities. The results of the activities related to the development of material and process, allows to ensure manufacturing and integration activities. High level and interface requirements: to be established in co-engineering targeting to both Vega and Ariane evolution applications.
High-pressure Multi-functional Lines – Objective is developing the technology of low-cost multi-functional high-pressure lines which will integrate at the same time hydraulic, mechanical, electrical functions. The main elements of those lines will be: High level of geometrical complexity necessary for the optimized engine integration, High level of displacement of the flexible element making a possible large gimballing angle of the engine necessary for stage piloting during landing, High-pressure resistance for the flexible elements, Integration of sensors for pressure, temperature, flow-rate measurements necessary for the engine control and diagnosis, Low mass necessary for engine performance and Low cost necessary for engine competitiveness, Evaluation will be made of the possibility of lines production by additive manufacturing processes to reach geometrical complexity, high-pressure application, low-mass and reduced cost.
Low-cost high thrust propulsion needs a breakthrough in AM technologies to improve the current European strategic launchers and prepare the next generation of EU low-cost and reusable launchers. It has been already demonstrated that AM technology can significantly reduce the recurring cost of space systems (especially for propulsion) if the “design for AM” mindset is followed, keeping a high level of material’s mechanical performance, and delivering net-shape complex components.
Three main AM technologies will be object of this activity:
Large Scale PBF-LB (Powder Bed Fusion – Laser Beam) printers for turbo-pumps, valves and combustion system devices. The team will develop PBF-LB melting, being this a key technology to enable the fast development and manufacturing of new reusable space launchers. The machines will be assessed at two different maturity levels, by manufacturing large parts and the full characterization of them. These full characterizations will allow to validate the achieved TRL and possibly early identify the machine’s weak points and then advise the manufacturer on the corrections to be performed.
LMD-p (Laser Metal Deposition – powder) technology – For this task, the team will develop LMD-p, an additive manufacturing technology wherein a laser source is used to melt metal-based powder onto a metal substrate. Using the technology allows the manufacturing and repair of complex or straightforward three-dimensional metallic parts. LMD-p shows high potential to manufacture low-cost metallic parts with large components and high complexity. Nevertheless, one major challenge of LMD-p is to manufacture large parts with integrated functional elements, complex geometries and good surface finishing. For this reason, several development areas of LMD-p have to be further improved to guarantee large parts of good quality. Among the applications, we can cite full-scale nozzle demonstrator, exhaust and line parts.
PBF-LB/MM (Powder Bed Fusion – Laser Beam / Multi-Materials) technology – Target is to mature the technology and enlarge the building envelope of PBF-LB machines, the combination of PBF-LB/MM parts manufactured from different materials remains one of the major challenges. While PBF-LB enables the manufacturing of integrated systems instead of assembling them from many parts, a compromise must be found in the choice of a mono-material for such systems. Multi-material PBF-LB/MM instead enables the manufacturing of metallic material combinations in one manufacturing process. Depending on the applications and the desired functions, different materials can be applied at different locations of a single integrally manufactured part. This technological breakthrough can be used to significantly reduce the mass and increase the performance of various space launcher systems, which makes it a suitable technology for low-cost production. The consortium proposes manufacturing a demonstrator part from two different metallic materials by multilateral PBF-LB/MM.
The main objective of this activity is to integrate the Health Monitoring System (HMS) as a major function applied to the next generation of expandable and reusable launchers and test it on a reusable liquid rocket engine (LRE).
Therefore a Fault Detection Isolation (FDI) algorithm will be developed with the AI tools, mainly based on the machine learning approach, and integrated into hardware(s) developed for the on-board/on-line components, and the off-board components foreseen for the dedicated on the ground device (post-flight analysis, maintenance; …).
Four different tasks are planned to cover the above objectives:
Managing HMS Technical Specifications by defining the overall logic for the Engine Health Monitoring System (EHMS). The hardware and software requirements will be defined taking also into account the inputs from subsystem key technologies previously identified at engine level and to be fully compatible with a future integrated test platform, in particular in terms of performance, functional interfacing (bus, analogic and digital signal), dataflow (flowrate and type of data exchanged) and functional description (high-level architecture). An engine simulator designed for data generation to provide a dataset that allows for training algorithms for the whole flight phase will be designed and developed, which modelises the engine with a coherency (noise, parameter lists) with the real engine and enables a parametrization to generate noise on the simulated values to allow for robust HMS and generate discrepancies in the engine.
Focus on the Hardware development activity according to the functional specifications and pre-estimated CPU constraints issued in previous task. In a first step, a trade-off will be performed to define the implementation of the hardware in the engine system (inside and at a specific location). Therefore, the Hardware will have to take into account all constraints linked to the integration of the system in the demonstrator frame (communication, environmental constraints, among others) and future launch system. Then the hardware development will necessitate defining a method to imbed the software.
Software development is another fundamental task, addressing two main phases of an engine life cycle : the flight phase and the engine qualification ground tests. During the flight phases and ignition as steady flight, the AI-based software should mainly address safety or reliability aspects, allowing early detection for on-board and quick analysis through automatic post-flight analysis. Concerning the steady phase, the monitoring alerts from their AI can be used for the flight system and engine control adaptation. The software’s architectures will be based on models built from available engine data and other AI tools.
Finally, with the Tests and validation activity, the software and the hardware previously developed for flight purposes will be integrated in a single system. The ground monitoring software will be applied in the ground system. To ensure correct integration of the hardware, an Engine Functional Simulation Bench (Hardware In The Loop system) will be put in place, where the validation of the functionalities of the developed components will be tested. Then a test campaign will be performed, validating the results using a real-time engine simulator for all described flight phases.
This activity will define the Engine Demo Platform, which will make possible the testing of the technologies in a real rocket engine environment. The demonstration platform will integrate all the developed technologies from previous tasks and the components developed in the frame of the ESA FLPP program as well. This activity will consist of definition of requirements, definition of engine demo platform and the evaluation of the impacts at engine test bench level.
© All rights reserved
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon Europe programme under grant agreement No 101082326