The study of external aerodynamics is now an integral part of the development of new vehicles. Indeed, in the current context of reducing energy consumption, it is essential for a vehicle to minimize losses wherever possible. Optimizing external aerodynamics limits the aerodynamic drag generated by the vehicle and therefore optimizes its energy efficiency. Moreover, in a car race context, it is also important to improve downforce to keep the vehicle on track in corners.
Parachutes for aerospace application is a new research area in the current era of space science. The scope of our project includes parachute design and inflation techniques. The current research project focuses on the following application areas: ● Parachutes for Re-entry Capsule ● RLV Parachutes Parachutes are used as aerodynamic decelerators in airdrop systems, so inflation is a significant fluid-structure interaction (FSI) phenomenon. New patterns of parachutes are constantly being developed and tested for airdrop systems but this research into parachute inflation is heavily reliant on historical experimental data. Till now, no parachute inflation model that is not based on this experimental data was developed. Material and instrumentation have changed significantly since the early experimental testing, yet the methods to develop the parachutes can still be traced to the same techniques used over ninety years ago. Rapid development of computational technology and modern computational mechanics combined with numerical simulation techniques have become more widespread in parachute research field and would enable us to develop the parachutes that are more optimized.
Study of Vehicle Aerodynamics with the ICFD Solver and its Application to the Quarkus P3 Pikes Peak Version