FLOMESS - Flight Loading Measurement System for Sounding Rockets

The future use of rockets is increasingly shifting from national to private interest. Here, primarily economic aspects decide the further development within the rocket technology. Our experiment deals with the weight reduction of the rocket structure itself in order to optimize the ratio of payload to total mass of a rocket. Here the FLOMESS project want to continue a started venture at the Bundeswehr University Munich. The FLOMESS experiment is intended to measure the structural strains during the launch of a sounding rocket. The occurring structural loads will be calculated from the measured strains. Furthermore, the system shall measure the effects of thermal strain to isolate them from the measurement. This is necessary to determine the pure structural strains. Therefore, a redundancy system of strain and temperature gauges is used on the inner surface of the experiment module. This system of relating the measured strain gauge response to the loading is taken over from previous projects on the fundament of the Skopinski method. This method was adapted for our experiment and illustrates an application of the Skopinski method to sounding rockets, where modifications being made to account all types of loadings. An accurate knowledge of the loads during the flight shall help to improve the existing semi-empirical methods for calculating these loads in different flight positions of a rocket. Since these predictions influence the design of the rocket vehicle, efficient design is achieved by reducing semi-empirical safety margins and increasing overall payload mass ratios. FLOMESS participated in the REXUS/BEXUS campaign of DLR and SNSA and, as a test of the system, the experiment was launched on the RX25 rocket on 11 March 2019. The results will be used to furtherdevelop the measurement methods.