Virtual instrument based dynamic balancing system for rockets and payloads

Spinning rocket vehicles and satellites in the atmosphere experience basically two types of unbalances, static and dynamic unbalances. These unbalances have to be reduced to an acceptable limit before clearing the payload for flight. In most of the traditional methods of measuring dynamic unbalance of rockets and payloads the measurement time is long and measurement accuracy is less due to manual intervention. Here a novel virtual instrument-based measurement system has been presented to solve these problems. The instrumentation consists of a single acquisition board and a power supply unit. The software of the measuring system has been developed using National Instrument's graphical programming language, LabVIEW. Data acquisition, signal processing, measurements and analysis are done by using different virtual instrument modules.