Design Methodology of a Hybrid Rocket-Powered Launch Vehicle for Suborbital Flight

A multidisciplinary design methodology for a launch vehicle (LV) with a hybrid rocket was proposed in order to obtain qualitative design knowledge. In this study, a propulsion system performance and aerodynamic performance were empirically evaluated using a theoretical approach, and flight evaluation was performed by solving equations of motion to evaluate the motion along the horizontal/vertical directions and rotation around the body axis. To demonstrate the applicability of the proposed method, two types of multiobjective design problems were solved using multiobjective evolutionary algorithms, and the results were visualized using the parallel coordinate plot, which is a data mining technique. The first design problem has two objective functions: the maximization of the highest altitude and the minimization of the total mass. In this case, the effect of the constraint related to the body length and diameter ratio was evaluated. The second design problem also had two objective functions and two constraints for a realistic LV design: the maximization of the downrange and the minimization of the total mass. The target altitude was different for these problems although the objective functions were identical. As a result, the trade-off information was successfully acquired for each design problem. It was also found that the body length and diameter ratio were key factors in deciding the maximum altitude. Furthermore, during the downrange maximization, the characteristic geometries observed in the obtained nondominated solutions revealed the design required to fulfill the constraint related to the target altitude.