In 2018 a group of students and I at Florida Tech started a team to compete in the Base11 Space Challenge. This had us designing, building, and flying a liquid fueled sounding rocket to the Karmen line (100 km). Unfortunetly during my time on the team we were not able to build the rocket but this project gave me a significant amount of experience working on a complex engineering project.
I was named the Flight Dynamics Officer and was reasonable for the rocket trajectory, avionics, and recovery systems. As part of that the team I lead worked on various tasks related to the rocket and testing such as trajectory modeling, vehicle stability, parachute sizing, and designing a ground testing data acquisition system. These projects all required a significant amount of collaboration with the other teams.
As part of this team, I created two models for the rocket's trajectory, one in MATLAB and one in Simulink. These models started as very basic numerical integrators to predict vehicle performance given some inputs from the propulsion system. As we progressed so did these models to include more complexities such as drag, mach effect drag, and pressure effects on thrust. We were also able to include our recovery system into the model to size both the drouge and main chutes. This allowed us to look at factors such as chute diameter and deploy altitude for both the main and drogue parachutes.
These models were able to produce useful outputs for the rest of the team such as flight time, load values, dynamic pressure, fuel consumed, and the baseline trajectory. These were all able to go help drive designs in the vehicles structure and propulsion systems' and represented a important part of our iterative design loop.
Below I have included the two models, the matlab model was developed first and is more preliminary. The Simulink model is much more developed and what the team was using when I left.