In order to study the fluid–solid coupling dynamic characteristics of parachute-payload system during drop process and analyze the unsteady aerodynamic characteristics under finite mass opening conditions, an adaptive moving fluid mesh method is developed on the basis of the existing arbitrary Lagrangian–Eulerian (ALE) fluid–solid coupling method. The calculation results of open force and drop velocity on the C-9 parachute demonstrate the effectiveness of this method. On this basis, the effect of canopies with three different permeability on parachute-payload system motion characteristic including opening property, steady descent property and stability is studied. Comparative analysis is conducted for structures and characteristics of vortex with different canopy materials, and interference mechanism of unsteady flow for parachute-payload system in unsteady oscillation is revealed. The results show that the adaptive moving fluid mesh method can effectively eliminate restrictions of existing simulation methods for parachute-payload system and significantly reduce calculation time. For the lightweight parachute, permeability has significant effect on kinetic characteristic of parachute-payload system. Canopy with large permeability has small opening load and structural stress in opening stage. After opening, there are mainly small vortexes distributed evenly behind the canopy with good stability. However, canopy with small permeability has obvious breath behavior and oscillation in opening stage. The main vortexes periodically shed off after opening. With the change of permeability from small to large, Parachute-payload system eventually presents three steady descent modes: conical descent, gliding descent and stable vertical descent.
Graphical abstract
A high-fidelity cargo airdrop simulation requires the accurate modeling of the contact dynamics between an aircraft and its cargo. This paper presents a general and efficient contact-friction model for the simulation of aircraft-cargo coupling dynamics during an airdrop extraction phase. The proposed approach has the same essence as the finite element node-to-segment contact formulation, which leads to a flexible, straightforward, and efficient code implementation. The formulation is developed under an arbitrary moving frame with both aircraft and cargo treated as general six degrees-of-freedom rigid bodies, thus eliminating the restrictions of lateral symmetric assumptions in most existing methods. Moreover, the aircraft-cargo coupling algorithm is discussed in detail, and some practical implementation details are presented. The accuracy and capability of the present method are demonstrated through four numerical examples with increasing complexity and fidelity.
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