A novel cable-net buffer device for recovering reusable launch vehicle: Design, dynamic modeling, and performance analysis

At present, reusable launch vehicle technology (RLV) has become a research hotspot in the aerospace field and one of the major development trends in this industry. With reference to the aircraft carrier’s arresting cable technology, this paper puts forward a novel cable-net buffer device for recovering the first stage of launch vehicle. The device can transfer load through a cable-pulley mechanism, and then complete the first stage recovery by losing the kinetic energy and gravitational potential energy of the first stage through hydraulic dampers and preloaded counterweights. In order to analyze the performance of this cable-net buffer device, the finite element software ABAQUS is adopted to establish a rigid-flexible coupling dynamic model. In this model, the cable-pulley mechanism is simulated by connector and shell elements, the damping force of the hydraulic dampers by VUAMP subroutine, and the preloaded counterweights by mass point. And then, performance evaluation indexes of this buffer device are proposed in this paper. Meanwhile, the dynamic simulation, using the established dynamic model, is carried out under different device design parameters and working condition parameters. On the one hand, the simulation results show that the tower span and damping force have remarkable effects on the buffer performance. On the other hand, among all working condition parameters, only the fall point deviation has a significant effect on the buffer performance, but this effect is less than that of the design parameters. Finally, combing the dynamic model and the surrogate model technique, this paper obtains feasible boundaries of design parameters of the device for the subsequent detailed design of it. Researches in this paper will provide new ideas for the development of RLV.