Fluid---structure interaction modeling of clusters of spacecraft parachutes with modified geometric porosity

  • Authors:

  • Kenji Takizawa;Tayfun E. Tezduyar;Joseph Boben;Nikolay Kostov;Cody Boswell;Austin Buscher

  • Affiliations:

  • Department of Modern Mechanical Engineering and Waseda Institute for Advanced Study, Waseda University, Tokyo, Japan 169-8050;Department of Mechanical Engineering, Rice University--MS 321, Houston, USA 77005;Department of Mechanical Engineering, Rice University--MS 321, Houston, USA 77005;Department of Mechanical Engineering, Rice University--MS 321, Houston, USA 77005;Department of Mechanical Engineering, Rice University--MS 321, Houston, USA 77005;Department of Mechanical Engineering, Rice University--MS 321, Houston, USA 77005

  • Venue:
  • Computational Mechanics
  • Year:
  • 2013

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Abstract

To increase aerodynamic performance, the geometric porosity of a ringsail spacecraft parachute canopy is sometimes increased, beyond the "rings" and "sails" with hundreds of "ring gaps" and "sail slits." This creates extra computational challenges for fluid---structure interaction (FSI) modeling of clusters of such parachutes, beyond those created by the lightness of the canopy structure, geometric complexities of hundreds of gaps and slits, and the contact between the parachutes of the cluster. In FSI computation of parachutes with such "modified geometric porosity," the flow through the "windows" created by the removal of the panels and the wider gaps created by the removal of the sails cannot be accurately modeled with the Homogenized Modeling of Geometric Porosity (HMGP), which was introduced to deal with the hundreds of gaps and slits. The flow needs to be actually resolved. All these computational challenges need to be addressed simultaneously in FSI modeling of clusters of spacecraft parachutes with modified geometric porosity. The core numerical technology is the Stabilized Space---Time FSI (SSTFSI) technique, and the contact between the parachutes is handled with the Surface-Edge-Node Contact Tracking (SENCT) technique. In the computations reported here, in addition to the SSTFSI and SENCT techniques and HMGP, we use the special techniques we have developed for removing the numerical spinning component of the parachute motion and for restoring the mesh integrity without a remesh. We present results for 2- and 3-parachute clusters with two different payload models.