Modeling and Simulation of a Ballistic Launch Vehicle in ECEF and Navigation Coordinate Systems

The purpose in this paper is to express a suitable process of modeling and simulation of a ballistic launch vehicle and introducing necessary mathematical solutions for the process. This vehicle is a three – stage ballistic launch vehicle such that each stage has independent condition and characteristic such as mass characteristic, aerodynamic characteristic, propulsion characteristic and control characteristic. The suitable coordinate systems are introduced and analyzed for modeling, such as inertial coordinate system, earth coordinate system, navigation coordinate system and body coordinate system. The equation of motion of this ballistic launch vehicle with respect to earth frame and navigation frame are considered and transformation matrices are mentioned to express definition of vectors in coordinate systems. In this procedure the earth is modeled as an ellipsoid surface with a gravitational field model according to World Geodetic System 1984. Avoiding singularity, quaternions are considered as rotational states instead of Euler angles. Finally, the results of simulation are presented and analyzed graphically.