Simulating Safe Landing : A Deep Dive into Parachute Inflation and Float with LS-DYNA

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.