Aero-space: Design of dampers for passive nutation control by nonlinear programming

The design of passive nutation dampers under certain optimality conditions and various practical constraints is considered. As an example, a cantilever type nutation damper for a dual-spinning space vehicle was chosen. This problem was previously treated by performing numerous computations and generating many families of graphs, which would require many time consuming computations. In this paper, the design program is reformulated as a nonlinear programming problem, and several examples are computed. The SUMT method is utilized in the computations. For a specified performance index and a specified set of constraints, the computation of each example took about one second on the IBM 360/91 system.