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Reliability-based optimized design of hybrid tether

Anil Kumar Agrawal (Department of Mechanical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology (BHU), Varanasi, India)
Mahendra Pratap (Aerial Delivery Research and Development Establishment (ADRDE), Defence Research and Development Organisation, Agra, India)
Subhash Chandra Sati (R&D Engineers, Defence Research and Development Organisation, Pune, India)
Rajeev Kumar Upadhyay (Department of Mechanical Engineering, Hindustan College of Science and Technology, Mathura, India)

Aircraft Engineering and Aerospace Technology

ISSN: 0002-2667

Article publication date: 29 June 2020

Issue publication date: 21 August 2020

120

Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to optimize the design of a hybrid tether using probabilistic approach considering inherent random variation in the stress developed and the strength it has. The variation in strength is mostly because of variation in diameter of the tether and the properties of the material along the length of the tether. As a result, classical design approach for the tether may not serve the purpose. For this purpose, a reliability-based design of hybrid tether is discussed in this paper.

Design/methodology/approach

A literature review was carried out on the design of tether and its operational reliability. It has been shown that the classical design approach does not serve the purpose, as the strategic operation has to be reliable enough, often requiring a measure of reliability required. A reliability-based approach has been presented to achieve the optimum design of a hybrid tether.

Findings

The optimization problem was carried out for different values of the safety factor to investigate the effect on the optimal design of tether. An analysis is carried out to show that one should not target a very high value of reliability or factor of safety, as it causes the self-weight of the tether to increase tremendously and its cost significantly.

Research limitations/implications

The present work has been carried out considering the limited data and can further be extended to determine more accurate reliability measures by considering more number of sample test data. The measured data is collected from limited required trials for demo; do not represent the exact population data.

Originality/value

Lab strength test and flight trials were conducted to acquire data for the present analysis. In field use, it was noticed that the tether degraded from top portion attached toward the balloon end because of maximum exposure and repeated usage.

Keywords

Acknowledgements

The authors thank to Mr. A K Saxena, Director, ADRDE, Agra, INDIA, for providing facilities and his kind permission to publish this paper. We also thank to Prof A.P. Harsha, Head of Department of Mechanical Engineering, IIT (BHU), Varanasi, India for logistic support and encourage to write this paper. Authors express their gratitude to all those who have provided their sincere cooperation and encouragement in improving the quality of paper.

Citation

Agrawal, A.K., Pratap, M., Sati, S.C. and Upadhyay, R.K. (2020), "Reliability-based optimized design of hybrid tether", Aircraft Engineering and Aerospace Technology, Vol. 92 No. 8, pp. 1141-1147. https://doi.org/10.1108/AEAT-01-2020-0007

Publisher

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Emerald Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2020, Emerald Publishing Limited

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