Space Engineering Practical

This course continues the track of previous ones teaching how to use systems engineering and the V-cycle but focuses on the verification aspects, providing practical experience to students over the full project cycle. In this course, you will gain practical experience to successfully conduct verification, starting from a set of initial requirements: this provides a real space engineering experience that will be fundamental during the thesis or the future career.

Everyone who ever designed an experiment or conducted simulations to verify system requirements has experienced issues with improperly formulated requirements on one hand and the preparation and execution of simulations and experiments on the other. Typical problems that occur are inadequate planning (lack of time), components not being in agreement with the design specifications, improper test set-ups, instrument failures, missing data, convergence issues, bugs, extremely long calculation times, and improper requirements verification. Learning about the basic steps will allow students to conduct such projects successfully in the future: a group project provides an environment to learn these aspects with the help of fellow students to be ready to carry out such activities alone in the future.

The course is divided into a set of lectures and workshops, providing fundamental knowledge about laboratory experiments and verification, and a practical group project where the acquired knowledge will be directly applied under the guidance of a supervisor.

The lectures focus on these topics:

• Why this course, course organization, project phases, timeline, deliverables

• Generating requirements including also test requirements, like test ranges and test tolerances,

• Hypothesis formulation and assessment,

• Design of Experiments, Experimental Measurements, and Error Propagation,

• Test planning and the development of the test set-up and the accompanying Assembly, Test and Safety Procedures.

• Data gathering/acquisition (both qualitative and quantitative) & automation

• Results analysis

• Other, like Safety, Types of Testing, Use of Standards

The second part of the course will be very practical, where student teams will be stepping through the project cycle of a experimentally oriented assignment. The steps include:

• Orientation (on project assignment, object/system to be researched/tested/verified under what conditions, goals)

• Estimation of the performances of the test object by design analysis/simulations

• Development of test hypothesis, and test requirements and criteria

• Generation of test specification with success criteria

• Generating a test plan

• Assembly/build of test object (may be a mock-up in case of use of hazardous materials)

• Assembly of (mock-up) test set up. early testing (including calibrations) and data elaboration to develop/check procedures

• Test readiness review (if review is passed go on to next step, if not revise test plan)

• Test execution

• Data elaboration (observations and experimental data)

• Discussion of results (data review)

• Communicating the results/outcomes + project close-out

For each project, supervisors may arrange for more specific training related to the specific test set-up to be used. Project supervisors are also responsible for students conducting safe testing.