Project Description

The team started this project with a focus on flight component testing. The goal is to design a test fixture that can evaluate radomes by subjecting them to high force and high temperature conditions. The following text is the original project description provided by our sponsor, Chuck Valence.

“Outer mold line flight components, such as missile and aircraft radomes and wing leading edges often operate in extremely harsh environments. Small practical radomes can be 6 inches in diameter and 18 inches in length. A large radome can be 4 feet in diameter and 8 feet long. Wing leading edges can vary as dramatically. Successful design efforts for these hardware components include testing to validate the design. Common environments to which the hardware is subjected include internal and external pressures, high heat fluxes, and pressure induced flight loads. Specialized test rigs to perform the testing are standard. The output of this project will be a set of design specifications for a test fixture which can be deployed in standard laboratories (may be outside) and capable of testing a wide variety of radomes and leading edge shapes and sizes as well as producing a wide variety of test environments (pressures, loads, fluxes). Some fabrication and testing of scaled models of the test fixture will benefit this project to prove it is viable but is not required.”

-Chuck Valence (Client)-

The description has been altered for this project by only considering missiles and placing a focus on radomes. Wing-leading edges may be considered later in this project.