DESIGN AND PROTOTYPING OF A SMART PROPELLANT TANK FOR SPACECRAFT

Composite structures have always played a crucial role in spacecraft design and development due to their lightweight, high performance, and impact on different aspects of sustainability. Smart structures are of rising interest in the space industry due to their inherent high-efficiency and high-performance during the development and operational phases. Propellant tanks are major components in launchers and satellites that take part, sometimes simultaneously, within different systems such as the propulsion and the structural systems. Incorporating “Intelligent” aspects in such systems and subsystems have put more emphasis on advanced features to be associated with various components in the spacecraft. The paper discusses the design and prototyping of a smart propellant tank of Type IV composite pressure vessel that employs embedded fiber optic sensors (FOS) and additively manufactured fiberreinforced polymer liner. For experimental study purposes, two types of FOS are employed to measure local temperatures and strains as fundamental measurands, and further quantities can be derived subsequently. Quasidistributed FOS of fiber Bragg grating (FBG) type as well as distributed FOS based on the optical frequency domain reflectometry (OFDR) processing are employed in this study to serve the operation and condition monitoring (OCM) and the structural health monitoring (SHM). The heating component, as a control element, in the smart tank is responsible for fluid temperature regulation for propellants’ combustion—depending on the application size-scale— and is of particular interest in pressure regulation for several propellants. The multi-functional smart propellant tank system is discussed, with the corresponding system representation. From the perspective of the utilization of intelligent, or smart, systems technology, several challenges and opportunities of theoretical and applied nature are highlighted in this study such as fluid phase-change identification in storage systems as well as smart structures development for modern spacecraft.