导航

ACTA AERONAUTICAET ASTRONAUTICA SINICA ›› 2016, Vol. 37 ›› Issue (3): 894-905.doi: 10.7527/S1000-6893.2015.0239

• Solid Mechanics and Vehicle Conceptual Design • Previous Articles     Next Articles

Membrane-cable-based nonlinear finite element method for inflation and contact problem of folded parachute cluster

FAN Yuxin, XIA Jian   

  1. College of Aerospace Engineering, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Nanjing 210016, China
  • Received:2015-03-27 Revised:2015-08-28 Online:2016-03-15 Published:2015-09-30

Abstract:

The inflation process of a single parachute from the initial folded configuration as well as the inflation of a parachute cluster tied at the bottom node is always coupled with a highly nonlinear contact phenomenon for that kind of thin flexible fabric structures. Conduction of numerical fluid-structure interaction simulation of parachute cluster must first figure out how to simulate nonlinear structural contact problem by applying proper numerical method. According to the transient and nonlinear dynamic behavior of parachute fabric system, using numerical method to predict parachutes' contact phenomenon and analyze the influence of contact mechanism for thin fabric structures will provide important meaning during parachute cluster designing. Based on the three-dimensional membrane-cable nonlinear finite element analysis code, a nonlinear contact algorithm for single folded parachute as well as parachute cluster is presented. In order to simulate arbitrary contact problems during inflation, a computation method for contact tangent stiffness matrix is also proposed in this paper. Because of the large scale of computation during nonlinear finite analysis of parachute cluster inflation, a parallel computation technique based on message passing interface(MPI) standard for membrane-cable structures is designed and coded by FORTRAN to solve this kind of problem. Finally, numerical simulations for highly folded C-9 parachute cluster inflation are carried out on a PC-Cluster computer group to verify the ability and efficiency of this new computational program and predict the contact phenomenon during inflation; the influence of contact mechanism has also been analyzed for the parachute cluster system.

Key words: parachute cluster, contact algorithm, nonlinear dynamic analysis, parallel programming, numerical simulation

CLC Number: