Dynamics and control of a spacecraft with a moving, pulsating ball in a spherical cavity

A model with two interacting bodies, for a spacecraft with liquid, has been developed. The spacecraft without liquid is the "tank" and is characterized by its inertial properties and the location and size of a spherical cavity. In the cavity is located the "slug", a sphere of uniform density with a variable radius. At the point of contact...

On transforming accelerometer data to angular rate

The representation of the acceleration field on a rigid body contains as parameters its angular rate and acceleration vectors plus the acceleration vector at a single point of the body. A linear accelerometer measures a local component of the field. From the response of different accelerometers, three quadratic forms in the angular rate of the...

On the simulation of fluid spacecraft interactive dynamics

The present report contains a study on the simulation of interactive fluid spacecraft dynamics. The equations of motion of the two dimensional full tank case as well as the corresponding finite different discretized equations are presented. The numerical solution of this system is studied. Results are presented for a number of cases. Based on...

Two-dimensional modelling of capillary liquid flow in a thin annulus

One of the experiments performed on board Spacelab, involves a partially filled annular cylinder which is subjected to prescribed motions (Ref. 1). The interest in this configuration arises from its practical use; for instance, the coolant in IRAS was stored in an annulus-like tank. In this report, a mathematical model for the transient liquid...