Structural Design

The canard fin can will be a carbon fiber tube, with 4 aluminum canards, each mounted to an aluminum servo horn and servo motor. The servos will be mounted internally to a 3D printed payload superstructure.

A truncated model was used for wind tunnel analysis and verification. To ensure our 3D printed structure wouldn't break under the forces in the wind tunnel, we conducted an analysis using flow data from ANSYS and static analysis in SolidWorks. The deflection was negligibly small, and the fins are expected to hold.

The overall design of the rocket is statically stable, with a stability of 1.36. This is defined as the distance between the center of gravity and the center of pressure divided by the diameter of the rocket body. The modular design of Astraea allowed us to choose where to place our canard fin can for an ideal stability factor between 1 and 2.