Wedgetail: A Sounding Rocket to Lift off Rocketry Education in Australia

摘要

Although Australia has numerous benefits for sounding rocket activities, there has been a limited extent of professional interest in the field of sounding rocketry from universities, especially at the undergraduate level. To overcome this shortcoming, USyd Rocketry Team, a student-led sounding rocketry group, has been established at the University of Sydney. As its first external initiative, the team worked on Project Wedgetail, a 2.2m-long, class M rocket intended to be launched at the Intercollegiate Rocket Engineering Competition (IREC) in the US. To achieve the aim of reaching 10,000 ft. (3km) altitude as accurately as possible, the students were required to work on different subsystems as an interdisciplinary team. Firstly, a high-level design was performed using OpenRocket. Subsequently, computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and finite element analysis (FEA) were conducted to verify the aerostructural design against the launch requirements, and a dual-deployment recovery system has been designed in-house to meet the maximum ground impact speed. Further, the students planned and executed the manufacturing of the rocket, involving composite fabrication and 3D printing. Wedgetail will also carry a CubeSat payload designed and built by students as part of coursework. By providing such a complex, interdisciplinary project with real-world relevance, we were able to enhance the motivation of the content, and challenge students to communicate with peers from other disciplines. Further, we expected that Wedgetail will serve as a valuable platform to facilitate future research and education, for instance in carrying scientific experiments to the atmosphere and allowing field verification of various student-led extensions.