693. Titan III Propellant Management Technique
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Paper
Abstract
The quantity of usable propellant remaining when the entire usable amount of the other propellant has been expended is defined as outage. Since this outage represents a launch vehicle perfomance penalty, outage mininimization through propellant management is an essential part of propulsion system design. Propellant management in the Titan 111 family of launch vehicles is achieved by preflight analyses and subsystem calibrations rather than through the use of an inflight propellant utilization system. This method simplifies the flight system and thus minimizes potential problems with flight hardware.
The analytical technique of propellant management primarily consists of matching the propellant 1oad to the average inflight mixtur eratio. The accuracy to which this match can be achieved is influenced by factors which affect loaded mixture ratio or burned mixture ratio, such as tank gas pressure-time history, propellant temperature, vehicle acceleration, and loading accuracy. Consequently, the analytical technique must account for thev ariations in the loaded mixture ratio and the burned mixture ratio.T his is done on a statistical basis by determining the possible deviations from nominal and combining the effects.
The treatment of the many variables that affect load and outage is discussed, together with flight results. It is shown that the Titan 111 propellant management technique has been effective in utilizing the usable propellant and minimizing outage.
