Rocket motor integration activities at Northrop Grumman field sites currently bond standoffs to their rocket motor domes using adhesives and tape. The standoffs are mounted to metal brackets which are taped to the motor dome for between 24 to 72 hours to allow for the adhesive to cure. This method is unreliable and fails roughly 5% of the time which incurs a waste of time and labor hours. For this reason Northrop Grumman's Flight Systems Group has requested for our team to design, analyze, and build a prototype universal standoff bonding tool that can be mounted to the attach rings of several variations of rocket motors (Castor 38, 30XL, and ORION 50XL), that will hold the standoff brackets in place while the adhesive cures.
The sponsor for this project is Daniel Johnson who can be contacted at daniel.johnson2@ngc.com, and the client is Northrop Grumman who can be visited at their webpage.
Team Information
Project description document containing project overview, customer needs, and overall objective.
Project background, requirements, benchmarking, literature review, customer needs and engineering requirements, schedule and budget.
Black Box Model, Functional Model, Concept Generation, Concept Evaluation, Budget Planning Update.
CAD Model with design descriptions, design requirements, analyses, FMEA, future test procedures, updated BOM, updated schedule and budget.
Preliminary Design Presentation (PDR) for Northrop Grumman. The presentation contains a compilation of information from presentations one to three.
Experimentation that involved measuring the strain of aluminum 6061 and steel 4130 to determine the best material for the rails.
Project Background, engineering requirements, design space research, concept generation, designs selected, and other aspects related to the project.
Project background, customer and engineering requirements, functional decomposition, house of quality, standards, codes, and regulations, testing procedures, risk analysis and mitigation, design selected
A post-mortem serves to reflect on the project and to identify what actions led to success and where improvements can be made.
The hardware review is a showcase of the current physical state of prototyping and manufacturing for the product.
This memo reviews the customer requirements and details changes to the engineering requirements and subsequent changes to the testing procedures.
The purpose of this memo is to discuss the Northrop Grumman Standoff Capstone Team’s implementation of manufacturing the final prototype.
The critical design review (CDR) is the presentation preceding the completion of the final product.
This presentation provides an update to the class on the current state of the project and the what steps will be taken moving forward.
The purpose of this memo is to provide an update on the manufacturing of the product as well as each indiviual teammates contributions.
This memo gives a report of what tasks are yet to be completed and how the team will procede given the impact of the pandemic.
This memo discusses the team’s implementation of manufacturing for the final prototype and addresses the standards, codes, and regulations relevant to the team’s design.
In depth manual on the operation and assembly of the final product. Provides detailed images on the construction of the device along with notes regarding the construction process.
This memo presents the final product and provides information on the contributions of each individual team member.
This report encompasses all work related to the project and provides details and discussion regarding all steps of the chosen design process.
This presentation goes over the project as a whole and the design process taken to arrive at the final product.
Video of the final presentation slides.
