NUMERICAL STUDY OF DIFFERENTIAL TORQUE-PRODUCING JETS IN A FLOATED-BALL INERTIAL PLATFORM

This paper presents a numerical study of the flow field caused by torq ue-producing jets in a floated-ball inertial guiding system. The basic flow element studied is the flow in a triangular region of octant sph ere surface confined by the two sphere surfaces and the three attitude -driver bands normal to each other. The results show the flow patterns of torque-producing jets and the relations between the effective driv ing torques and the flow rates under several typical working condition s. The working performances of two kinds of differential torque-produc ing jets are analyzed and compared. The second kind of differential to rque-producing jets, which is first proposed in this paper, has the pr ominent merit, i.e., the regulation of the three components of driving torque can be realized by non-interference adjustment, so that the th ree components of angular displacement can be controlled independently .