January 2005
Authors:
Denis Gély
Georges Elias
Flavia Mascanzoni
Henri Foulon
In the frame of the VEGA program, a collaboration between AVIO and ONERA has been established to characterize the acoustic environment of the VEGA launch vehicle which will lift-off from the ex-launch pad ELA1 of the former Ariane 1 in Kourou. A test campaign has been performed in the MARTEL facility, located in the CEAT of Poitiers University, in order to perform a trade-off analysis of different configurations compatible with the existing ELA1 launch pad which will be adapted for VEGA. The tests were performed using a mock-up at the 1/33 scale and the microphones were mainly installed on the launch vehicle represented by the cylindrical Air-hydrogen combustion chamber of MARTEL. In 2004, ONERA carried out a new test campaign using the AVIO BEAT facility in Colleferro (Italy) to determine the whole characteristics of the incident acoustic field generated by the first stage P80. The test were performed at fixed altitudes with a 1/20 scale LV mock-up equipped with a realistic solid propellant booster. Acoustic source localization has been implemented using a 26-microphone-array surrounding the fairing. Moreover, a model has been developed to simulate the incident acoustic field with the minimum number of sources. According to the third octave band, 1 to 6 uncorrelated plane waves are sufficient to reproduce the measured acoustic field in amplitude and phase.