WEIGHT OPTIMISATION OF MISSILE LAUNCHER SYSTEM
ProSIM has worked extensively in defence sector providing in depth engineering design services for various types of missile launch systems for Indian air force, army and navy. As engineering design consultants, ProSIM has solved complex problems in design and qualification for launch systems in both design qualification and optimization for weight.
FEA engineering services for missile launcher vehicle to improve stiffness and minimize settling time
The requirement was critical as the missile launcher vehicle was already underway into production and actual missile firing test showed that the firing time between two consecutive shots was around 6 seconds which was higher than allowable time of 3 seconds.
ProSIM acted as engineering service outsourcing agency and executed project for missile launch system which required design optimization to improve stiffness and strength of the overall design. The challenge was to minimize the time between each missile firing i.e. reducing the settling time due to the low stiffness of the missile launcher assembly and the mobile truck chassis.
The understanding of the functional requirements of design from customer and end user and the qualification and certification requirements were of major importance as the design optimization had to be executed within these parameters.
ProSIM performed FEA simulations and multi body dynamics (MBD) to understand the stress distribution and low strength areas in the mobile vehicle chassis. From the analysis results, design modifications were made to the vehicle chassis and weight of the launcher was optimized. The simulations were carried out again for the modified design. The target was for the settling time between firing to be reduced from 6 seconds to 3seconds.
By understanding the behavior of the missile launcher in MBD simulations, ProSIM was able to improve the stiffness of the launcher by modifying cross members design on the chassis in to improve its stiffness and without significant change in weight. After the design modifications were completed, the settling time between firing was reduced to less than 3 seconds.
This helped the customer to significantly ramp up the production of the missile launcher vehicle without significantly impacting the production schedule. During the testing of the modified missile launcher vehicle, the results correlated with ProSIM qualification results wherein the settling time between consecutive shots had reduced to 3 seconds.
