On the Design of a Micropropulsion Based Inflation System for Beyond Earth Orbit CubeSat Inflatable Reflectors

In recent years an exciting new era of space exploration has begun with the advent of the beyond Earth orbit CubeSat (BEOC) missions. However, utilizing the CubeSat platform for such missions gives rise to a series of significant technological challenges. Fortunately, the field of inflatable space structures offers some tantalizing solutions to...

Europa Lander Landing System: Study on Deployment, Landing and Preliminary Design

The Europa Lander is a mission by NASA to land scientific instruments on the Jovian Moon by 2030. The current design of the landing system envisions fixed landing legs with the lander being lowered down at very low velocities (≈ 0.1 m/s) by use of a Skycrane. This latter system not only adds mass, but also requires complicated moving parts and a...

Modelling Delamination in an Equivalent Single Layer Model in Explicit Finite Element Analysis

Delamination is one of the failure modes of composites prone to happen in the case of a car crash. In the early stages of car design, finite element analysis is used as a tool to analyze structural concepts. In order to model delamination in a newly developed material model, it is analyzed in two parts: detection and effects of delamination. To...

Strain Rate Dependent Compression Properties of Carbon-Epoxy Laminates

With increasing usage of fibre-reinforced composites for structural components across the automotive and aerospace industry, it became crucial to understand how this kind of materials behave when subjected to high loading rates, which are encountered in the case of crash events. <br/>The current work presents a study on the effect of the strain...