Design

The design was simple: a ring would be cut out of a solid block of Aluminum 6061-T6, a lathe would be used to create the lip, and the legs would be cut out of another block of aluminum before being welded to the ring. The lip acted as the interface between the ring and the nose cone, which would be adhesively bonded. The legs would each slide into structural C-channels and secured with shear pins which would be broken by an actuator when the nose cone is ejected. In the SolidWorks CAD assembly, the weld beads were individually modelled to account for different material properties.

Analysis

The primary analysis done on the nose cone ring was a static simulation accounting for the compressive force of the engine's thrust and aerodynamic drag pressure on the nose cone. In the simulation, the structural C-channels were fixed and treated as rigid bodies, and pin connectors were used to interface them with the nose cone ring. This was done to account for the contact forces between the top of the C-channels and the bottom of the ring. Additionally, all contacts were treated as no-penetration, with the exception of the contacts between the weld bead and the nose cone ring, which were treated as bonded. Iterative simulation and redesign was done until mass was minimized while maintaining a minimum factor of safety (FoS) of at least 1.5.