Embedded Environmental Stress Recorder for Launch Vehicle Subsystems

Abstract

The design and implementation details of a compact and efficient environmental stress recorder for launch vehicle sub systems are presented here. The proposed system can monitor and record various environmental stresses like temperature, humidity, vibration and shock experienced by launch vehicle subsystems during their realization, storage and transportation phases with a time tag. The system is rugged enough to withstand extreme environmental conditions. The system has built-in sensors to sense various parameters, processing electronics to analyze and extract useful information from large bandwidth signals and memory to store the data. The product has low weight, low power consumption and is easily mountable. The data from the system is easily retrievable and an analysis software has been developed which will run in a laptop or PC and takes as input the stresses that the system has undergone during the realization and evaluation phases. The product was evaluated successfully by subjecting it to various environmental tests. The product evaluation showed that the data and the analysis can be used to ensure that no unintentional stresses or handling issues have happened for the subsystems thereby aiding quality assurance at each level of launch vehicle system realization.