An effective engineering approach to launch vehicle stability analysis

Abstract

Ensuring the stability of the launch vehicle's flight is a crucial prerequisite for mission success. In practical engineering, establishing an accurate mathematical model and directly conducting stability analysis is extremely difficult, as the launch vehicle is a strongly coupled, high-order, time-varying nonlinear dynamical system integrating rigid body motion, structural elasticity, liquid sloshing, and variable mass characteristics. Traditional stability criteria for nonlinear systems, such as the Lyapunov method, are theoretically rigorous, but they have significant limitations in engineering applications due to issues such as the difficulty in constructing suitable Lyapunov functions and the huge amount of real-time computation required. By analyzing these linearized models, the stability of the rocket throughout the flight process can be effectively evaluated, providing a basis for control system design