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A Novel Variable Topology Design For A Multi Flexible Eje - 2020 - Defence Techn
A Novel Variable Topology Design For A Multi Flexible Eje - 2020 - Defence Techn
A Novel Variable Topology Design For A Multi Flexible Eje - 2020 - Defence Techn
Defence Technology
journal homepage: www.keaipublishing.com/en/journals/defence-technology
a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t
Article history: The airborne missile launch mechanism often subjects to significant deformations induced by the large
Received 5 May 2019 ejection force during high-speed actuations in missile ejection process, leading to a substantial deviation
Received in revised form of separation parameters from designed values that threats safety of the carrier. This study proposes a
5 July 2019
novel variable topology design for launch mechanism, achieved via a Prismatic-Revolute-Revolute pair
Accepted 29 July 2019
Available online 29 July 2019
(PR-R) motion formed by the structural gap with a specific direction. It enables launch mechanism
variability during missile ejection process and optimizes the ejection force given by the front and back
ejection arms, and greatly optimizes the separation parameters during missile ejection. The kinetics
Keywords:
Variable topology
simulation analysis is conducted under working conditions of the original ejection mechanism and the
Gap dynamics novel mechanism with variable topology design, respectively. The results show that the novel variable
Multi-flexible body topology design is more befitting for the launch process in terms of system safety and controllability,
Flexible control effectively improving the separation posture, restraining the flexible effect of the mechanism, and ful-
Ejection mechanism filling the effectiveness of the design value of multi-rigid body.
© 2020 China Ordnance Society. Production and hosting by Elsevier B.V. on behalf of KeAi
Communications Co. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://
creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dt.2019.07.017
2214-9147/© 2020 China Ordnance Society. Production and hosting by Elsevier B.V. on behalf of KeAi Communications Co. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-
ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).
H. Liu et al. / Defence Technology 16 (2020) 432e438 433
separation parameters, and pointed out that the initial angular software, and then imported into ANSYS. This paper adopts the
velocity of the missile was “rise” due to the flexibility of the second method.
mechanism during the catapult launching.
In order to ensure the launch safety, the embedded missile 2) Material attribute input
needs a downward velocity and downward angular velocity relative
to the carrier. However, due to the large ejection force and the Input material properties, including material density, elastic
strictly lightweight design, the components of the ejection mech- modulus and Poisson's ratio.
anism suffer from serious flexible deformation, resulting in critical
deviation of the angular velocity of the missile from the designed 3) Grid generation
value, even leading to the “head-up” problem which threats the
safety of the carrier. Currently, there are two common methods to For 3D solid model, the Brick 8 node 185 mesh in ANSYS can be
solve the flexible deformation problem for high-speed motion selected, with the mesh side length smaller than 3 mm. For modal
mechanism: calculation, default Block Lanczos method is applied, which is often
used in solid grid, with many advantages such as wide application,
1) Increase the stiffness of the mechanism components. It can high precision and fast calculation speed.
reduce the flexibility deformation effect of the mechanism. But
it also significantly increases the weight and the volume of the 4) Output files to ADAMS
ejection mechanism, which is conflict with the lightweight
design requirement. The file output for ADAMS needs to set the order of the modal,
2) Passive control method using damping layer [9,10] and active which can be generally taken based on engineering experience. The
control method based on piezoelectric actuation [11e13]. The more orders, the greater the computational burden of the model.
airborne missile catapult launcher requires a stringent, light- Here, the first 15e30 orders of the modal are selected.
weight and compact design with large ejection force and short
actuation time (less than 0.15 s). The passive control method of 2.1. Mechanism configuration of the fixed topological launcher
damping layer and the active control method of piezoelectric
actuator are difficult to be implemented due to the limited The airborne missile launch mechanism is based on the
control effect and high engineering cost. configuration of the US AMREL mechanism, which has a double y-
shaped mechanism, with ejection power derived from the hy-
Variable topology design is a new method [14e17] used for draulic piston rod which can only move horizontally, as shown in
optimizing the mechanism function. Currently, the optimization of Fig. 1. The hydraulic power drives the piston of the horizontal piston
the dynamic behavior of the flexible mechanism is rarely reported. rod, pushing the horizontal piston rod (denoted as no. 4 in Fig. 1) to
This paper proposes a novel variable topology design to optimize slide forward horizontally. The front head of the missile is located at
the airborne missile ejection separation parameters by using the the left end of the missile shown in Fig. 1.
variable kinematic pair to realize the variable topological design. Each y-shaped mechanism constitutes two isosceles triangles
This method focuses on the suppression of the flexibility effect of for converting the horizontal thrust given by the hydraulic piston
the entire ejection mechanism instead of individual component. rod into a vertical downward thrust of the push arm, thereby
The variable topology design can also be used for the dynamic pushing the missile to move downwards at a high speed. After
performance optimization of other parallel high-speed flexible reaching a certain distance, the missile leaves the launcher at a
actuators. certain speed and attitude. The y-shaped mechanism at the front
end of the launch device is designed to be longer than the y-shaped
2. Dynamics model of the missile ejection based on a fixed mechanism at the rear end. The launch mechanism has an assembly
topological launcher height of 109 mm in initial contraction state and an ejection stroke
of 350 mm. Ejection stroke represents that the missile is separated
The dynamics model of the missile ejection process is based on from the launcher structure, after 350 mm downward of the mass
the combination of the finite element method and the multi-body center of the missile from the initial position.
dynamic Lagrange equation. Considering the complexity of the
mechanism model, the mechanical components that flexible pro-
2.2. Lagrange dynamic equation for multi-flexible mechanism
cessed in finite element software (ANSYS) are assembled according
to the actual motion constraint pair.
The multi-flexible dynamics is described by using the coordi-
Firstly, the modal analysis of each flexible component is carried
nate system as shown in Fig. 2, which consists of the inertial
out via the finite element software (ANSYS), and the modal neutral
file is generated, which is required by the multi-body dynamics
software (ADAMS) for multi-flexible body dynamics modeling. Af-
ter the components being assembled according to the actual mo-
tion constraint pairs, the ejection power is set up. Finally, the virtual
prototype simulation model of the ejection mechanism of airborne
missile is established.
The detailed flexible process of components can be divided into
four steps:
Fig. 1. The configuration of the AMELT launcher in its initial stage: 1. Structure of the
Components with simple shapes can be directly modeled in ejection mechanism, 2. Front support arm, 3. Front push arm, 4. Horizontal hydraulic
ANSYS. But for those of complex shapes, the modeling can be built piston rod, 5. Rear support arm, 6. Hydraulic actuated cylinder, 7. Rear push arm, 8.
in software Unigraphics NX (UG) or other professional 3D modeling Missile.
434 H. Liu et al. / Defence Technology 16 (2020) 432e438
2) Potential energy W
1
W ¼ xT K x (8)
2
Table 1
Main simulation parameters.
Note: The unit of length is m and the unit of weight is kg. The pitching moment of
inertia of the missile is relative to its center of gravity.
Fig. 6. The downward force on the missile by the front and rear push arms under the
Fig. 4. Separation speed simulation during missile ejection. multi-rigid and multi-flexible body conditions.
436 H. Liu et al. / Defence Technology 16 (2020) 432e438
later period, with a force of 14631 N at the time of ejection mechanism continues to operate until the missile is separated from
separation. aircraft.
Simulation results demonstrate that after enabling the mecha- During the ejection process, the mechanism performs a topo-
nism flexibility, the vertical force results of the front and rear push logical transformation when the rotating shaft reaches the rear end
arms on the missile shows significant difference with that of the of the U-shaped gap. The front pushing arm is changed from the
multi-rigid dynamics model, especially at the end of the ejection, rotating and the sliding to the relative rotation with respect to the
where the force of the front push arm is decrease rapidly instead of piston rod, that is, the movement of the Prismatic-Revolute (PR)
continuously increasing. The force is 9732 N at the time of sepa- pair is changed to a Revolute (R) pair. Therefore, the U-shaped gap
ration; In contrast, for the rear push arm, its value continues topology design here is referred to as the Prismatic-Revolute-
increasing instead of decreasing at the end, reached 34072 N at the Revolute (PR-R) kinematic pair. After the topology of the mecha-
time of ejection separation. nism is changed, the ejection power is provided by both the front
Therefore, the huge force changes of the missile by the front and and rear push arms instead of only rear arm.
rear push arms could result in seriously deviating from the ideal
design value of the angular velocity of the missile at the moment of 4.2. Dynamic contact force model of the PR-R kinematic pair
ejection separation, even the occurrence of “head-up”, which
seriously threatens the safety of missile launch. Consequently, to In the case of the variable topology design, the rotation pair
resolve this problem, it is necessary to reduce the influence of adopted in the fixed topology mechanism is not fit as the motion
thrust force change caused by the front push arm and the rear push constraint of the front push arm, the horizontal piston rod and the
arm. Specifically, in the last stage of the ejection process, the force rotating shaft. Instead, the contact force between the rotating shaft
acted by the front push arm should be increased, while the force of and the horizontal piston rod is used to judge whether the rotating
the rear push arm needs to be decreased. shaft and the horizontal piston rod have the interaction force.
While considering the practical design of the structure, the front
4. Dynamics simulation analysis of ejection process using push arm and the rotating shaft continue to adopt the rotation
variable topological design constraint.
The model of normal contact force F of PR-R motion constraint
4.1. Variable topological design of ejection mechanism considers both the material stiffness at the contact location and the
damping effect in impact event. In this case, the classical Lankarani-
To prevent the angular velocity of the airborne missile from Nikravesh dynamics model [18] is used:
deviating from the designed value, it is necessary to suppress the
flexibility effect of the entire ejection mechanism. Considering that F ¼ K dn þ C d_ (11)
the ejection time is only 0.11 s and the ejection force reaches up to Among them: K for the contact stiffness of the rotating shaft and
several tons, the existing flexible suppression methods of various the horizontal piston rod at the gap, 5 107 N/mm is taken in this
mechanisms have great limitations. paper. C for the damping coefficient of the contact, d for embedding
Fig. 7 is the variable topology design of ejection mechanism. At depth, n for the index coefficient, take 2.2 in this paper. The rela-
the hinge of the shaft hole of the front main arm and the horizontal tionship between multiple groups of embedded depth d and con-
piston rod, a clearance having a specific direction and size is tact force F can be calculated according to the structural design
designed in the rotary hole, which is different from the random parameters at the hinge of the launching mechanism by using the
machining error generated during manufacturing. The clearance finite element method, and then K and n in Eq. (11) can be deter-
designed in this research is a horizontal U-shaped gap located mined by combining results of the least square method and engi-
behind the rotating shaft. In the initial state, the rotating shaft is neering experience.
located at the front of the U-shaped gap.
In the initial stage of ejection, due to the existence of horizontal 3 1 e2
U-shaped gap, the piston rod cannot apply force on the front push C¼ K (12)
4d_ 0
arm. The ejection power of the piston rod can only act on the
missile via the rear push arm. During the ejection process, the
where e is the material recovery coefficient of the horizontal plug
rotating shaft in U-shaped gap slips backward, reaching the rear
rod structure, take 0.8 in this paper; Pc5-
end of the U-shaped gap after the mechanism stretching a certain
Antarctica_JASTP_keywords_V2 is the initial relative velocity
distance. The horizontal piston rod then can generate horizontal
when the rotating shaft is in contact with the horizontal piston rod.
force on the rotating shaft, further pushing the front push arm
which acts on the missile in vertical downward direction. The
4.3. Simulation results and analysis
The simulation was conducted on the forces of the front and rear
push arm, and the ejection separation angular velocity of the var-
iable topological ejection mechanism after using the PR-R gap pair.
The PR-R gap in the simulation model is set to 2 mm.
Fig. 8 is a normal contact force at the PR-R gap pair. It shows that
the rotation axis of the PR-R gap pair begins to contact with the
piston rod at 6.7 ms, and the contact force is 18700 N. At this
moment, the topological form of the ejection mechanism changes.
Before that, the piston rod has no force applied on the front push
arm. While after that, the piston rod has a force on the front push
arm, and the force gradually increases, reaching a peak of
24542 N at 55 ms, and then the contact force gradually decreases
Fig. 7. Variable topology design of ejection mechanism. and approaches zero at 110 ms.
H. Liu et al. / Defence Technology 16 (2020) 432e438 437
5. Discussion