Health Monitoring of Reuseable Rockets: Basics for Sensor Selection

Abstract

With regard to the space field, the number of the sensors has grown for a middle-sized spacecraft from more than 500 at the beginning of the twenty-first century [1] to several thousands for nowadays applications. Meanwhile, Reusable Launch Vehicles (RLVs) moved their steps from demonstrators to commercial working systems. As a result, Health Monitoring (HM) is conquered its own space in the field and sensors are the primary elements required for implementing a monitoring unit. The innovative concept of reusable rockets requires, from the point of view of HM implementation, not only the evaluation of the vehicle health status but also the prediction of the reusability of the individual subsystems w.r.t. the next launch cycle. Therefore, the goal of this work is divided in two parts. The former is to identify the most critical points for the development of reusable rockets, focusing on theoretical working conditions and analysis or failures. The latter is to discuss the sensing units useful for addressing the defined points, describing the possible innovative approaches for sensing the system conditions. Among them, piezoelectric units, fiber optics, imaging units, and conductive layers can be identified for enhancing the comprehension of the system working conditions.