Reaction Wheel for Active Roll Control

As an independent project to be counted towards the aerospace concentration portion of my mechanical engineering degree, I designed, prototyped, and tested this reaction wheel with the goal of securing it inside a high power rocket to control its roll axis during flight.

The reaction wheel utilizes a proportional-integral-derivative (PID) closed-loop feedback controller to control the angular position of the system it’s attached to by continually adjusting the PWM frequency sent to a DC motor depending on the measured angular position from an IMU. The angular position of the system over time was logged and sent to a computer via bluetooth. Finally, a MATLAB program was used to parse the recieved data and generate plots. The below images and text give a good summary of the success of the prototype.

This plot shows a case where the system
was perturbed by −152.31◦. The reaction wheel actively
responded to this perturbation and brought the system to
within 10◦ of its target angle, −7.69◦, within just 1.12 seconds,
and to within 5◦ of its target angle in 2.44 seconds. — This plot shows a case where the system was perturbed by −152.31◦. The reaction wheel actively responded to this perturbation and brought the system to within 10◦ of its target angle, −7.69◦, within just 1.12 seconds, and to within 5◦ of its target angle in 2.44 seconds.

Plot showing the angular position vs. time after
successive perturbations were produced in both directions.
This is similar to the example demonstration shown in the
gif at the top of the page — Plot showing the angular position vs. time after successive perturbations were produced in both directions. This is similar to the example demonstration shown in the gif at the top of the page