Roll Control of a Smooth Body Missile

The Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) sponsored this project with the intended end-use of applying innovative roll control to developmental missile programs. They tasked the MUTANT Interceptor Team to establish roll control for a smooth body missile on launch. The joint team from the United States Air Force Academy (USAFA) and Brigham Young University (BYU) has proposed and developed a roll control mechanism for a smooth missile body when in a stored configuration in a weapons bay. Eliminating the need for fixed traditional control fins greatly reduces the packing volume of an individual missile allowing for increased missile storage, especially in aircraft such as the F-22 or F-35. The result of the ideation, initial testing, and verification resulted in a deployable control surface that resembles a scissor-like retracting method to achieve the desired performance. This solution satisfies critical performance requirements as discussed with the customer. The final fin design was built on a scissoring mechanism that when stowed, folded down toward the missile body, greatly improving the overall packing factor of the weapons. Once launched, the scissor mechanism would deploy, pulling taut a high temperature fabric over the linkages, establishing the final fin geometry and enabling roll control. The proposed design met customer-defined lift and drag requirements, while finite element analysis (FEA) revealed a factor of safety greater than ten.