Design, assembly and commissioning of a flexible testbench for propulsion system components

Sammanfattning: Since its foundation in 2011 and among other things, OHB Sweden has beenappointed to fully develop, from the design to the assembly, a yearly increasingnumber of propulsion systems, ranging from chemical propelled to fully electricalspacecraft. One of the major contributor to the cost of this process, both in termsof money and time spent, is the verication phase, a combination of processes thatsets out to demonstrate that all the applicable requirements are met and to provethat the system is capable of fullling its objective during the mission lifespan.The increasing number of projects running simultaneously led to the need for aninnovative, smart solution to reduce the overall eorts spent on verication.The thesis work described in this document addresses the development of a newtest bench that allows carrying out qualication and acceptance tests on dierentcomponents or sub-assemblies of propulsion systems while requiring minimumsetup modications. The achievement of this goal would result in great benets toOHB Sweden, decreasing both the direct and indirect costs of the testing activities.Indeed, the current baseline approach consists of developing and assembling a newsetup every time a test is scheduled. Flexibility of the bench is a major goal: it isachieved by mounting relevant components in custom design brackets that can inturn slide on aluminium rails. This ensures the possibility of adding, removing orreplacing components without the need of disassembling the entire setup.