Substantiation of Reliability of Calculation of Strength of Rocket and Space Technology Structures Without Destructive Tests

Abstract

Reducing the cost of launching a unit of payload into orbit is one of the priority tasks of the rocket and space industry. At the same time, despite the stringent requirements for the quality of work on the design and creation of load-bearing structures of new equipment, which are carried out using modern, sufficiently advanced computer modeling tools and manufacturing technologies, at the final stage of development, their reliability is verified by conducting rather expensive destructive field tests of the created fragments and (or) the entire structure. This significantly increases the cost of such products and reduces their competitiveness in the market of rocket and space technology services. This problem is due to the presence of a certain discrepancy in the results of calculation, non-destructive testing and destructive testing. The presented work is aimed at building a more reliable approach to predicting the bearing capacity of heterogeneous shell structures of modern engineering, in particular, elements of rocket and space technology, tanks, dry compartments of launch vehicles, etc., in order to refuse to conduct or reduce the volume of expensive destructive tests. The influence of deviations of different nature of the input parameters of the problem (geometric dimensions, values of physical and mechanical characteristics, parameters of external loads, fixing conditions, etc. Examples of problems demonstrating the undesirable effect of such deviations of input data on the calculation result are given. A methodology based on the data of non-destructive (in elastic domain) experimental study of the structure behavior and the results of system interactive computer simulation of the calculation process with the involvement of elements of the sensitivity theory to assess the dependence of the calculation results on the input parameters is developed. The results of the research can be used to make adjustments to the design and calculation data and to substantiate the reliability of the results of numerical analysis without destructive testing of complex engineering structures.