Improvements in Fluid Structure Interaction Simulations of Parachutes Using LS-Dyna®

Abstract

The French Ministry of Defence’s procurement agency, the Direction Generale de l'Armement (DGA), is in charge of assessing and testing armament systems in order to equip the armed forces and prepare for the future. DGA Aeronautical Systems, the technical centre dedicated to evaluate and test aircraft, combines test and evaluation to clear, among others, parachute systems. The parachute evaluation is historically based on experimental data and so requires numerous flight tests which can prove expensive and time consuming. In order to have a greater understanding of the parachute dynamic behavior and to optimize the parachute systems flight tests, DGA Aeronautical Systems developed a modeling and simulation capability as a support to evaluation. For this purpose, DGA Aeronautical Systems, with the help of ISAE, developed Fluid Structure Interaction (FSI) simulations of parachutes using the LS-Dyna commercial Finite Element Analysis (FEA) tool. This tool is largely used for solving highly nonlinear transient problems and enables doing coupled multi-physics simulations such as FSI simulations. DGA Aeronautical Systems has been using the software since 2003. In the recent years, the parachute simulation has been much improved thanks to the implementation of a porosity algorithm in LS-Dyna at the common request of DGA and parachute industry. The paper presents recent improvements in Arbitrary Lagrangian Eulerian (ALE) techniques used to analyze the canopy inflation and the quasi-steady state descent phases characteristics. Up to now, only infinite mass type simulations were developed by constraining the parachute confluence point and applying a prescribed airflow to the fluid. The applied airflow velocity came from real in-flight measurements of paratrooper or load trajectory determinations. This simulation type is representative to wind tunnel tests. From now on, thanks to considerable computational resources, finite mass type simulations are also possible. It consists in applying the force of gravity to the parachute system. This allows simulating both the inflation phase (from vertical packed parachute geometry) and the quasi-steady state descent. Among others, the static line parachute of the new French Army troop parachute system called EPC (Ensemble de Parachutage du Combattant) was modeled at real scale. Modeling techniques are presented and results of the EPC static line parachute simulation are compared with real inflight measurements. The benefits of FSI simulations prior to parachute testing are presented. In a near future, incompressible and compressible Navier-Stokes solvers will be available in the next version of LS-Dyna. These code enhancements will be tested to simulate the parachute flight and hopefully will bring the ability to analyze more accurately the aerodynamics of the canopy and the structural behavior of the fabrics. These future capabilities are also discussed.