Airbrakes control
Hi everyone! How are you doing?
I’m currently working on the flight computer responsible for the active control of a rocket’s airbrakes, and this is my first time developing this kind of system. My background is mainly in software engineering, so I still have a lot to learn about rocket aerodynamics and flight behavior.
Right now, my team has only provided me with the drag coefficients for the airbrakes at 0% and 100% deployment. However, I feel that this may not be enough to build a precise control system. They told me the airbrakes are relatively small, so even full deployment would not represent a major risk, but I still think the controller could perform much better if I had aerodynamic data for intermediate deployment percentages as well.
I was wondering if anyone could recommend:
- Resources/books/papers about active airbrake control
- MATLAB or Simulink examples related to rocket control systems
- GitHub repositories with airbrake simulations or flight-control code
- Methods to estimate drag coefficients for intermediate deployment angles
- Common workflows for validating or tuning these systems
My main goal right now is understanding how these systems are usually modeled and simulated before implementing the embedded software.
Any advice would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!