Fluid--structure Interaction Modeling of Orion Space Vehicle Parachutes

　Tayfun E. Tezduyar
　Team for Advanced Flow Simulation and Modeling (T*AFSM)
　Mechanical Engineering, Rice University
　Houston, TX 77005, USA
　http://www.mems.rice.edu/TAFSM/

　Abstract

NASA will be using a cluster of three ringsail parachutes, referred to as the "mains", during the terminal descent of the Orion space vehicle. In this presentation we focus on fluid--structure interaction (FSI) modeling of these ringsail parachutes. The geometric complexity created by the "rings" and "sails" used in the construction of the parachute canopy poses a significant computational challenge. Our FSI modeling of ringsail parachutes is based on the stabilized space--time FSI (SSTFSI) technique and the interface projection techniques that address the computational challenges posed by the geometric complexities of the fluid--structure interface. Two of these interface projection techniques are the FSI Geometric Smoothing Technique (FSI-GST) and the Homogenized Modeling of Geometric Porosity (HMGP). We describe the details of how we use these two supplementary techniques in FSI modeling of ringsail parachutes. In the simulations we report here, we consider a single main parachute, carrying one third of the total weight of the space vehicle. We present results from FSI modeling of various scenarios.

　BIO-BIBLIOGRAPHY - Tayfun E. Tezduyar

Dr. Tezduyar received his Ph.D. from Caltech in 1982. After postdoctoral work at Stanford, he had faculty positions at University of Houston and University of Minnesota. At Minnesota he became a full professor in 1991 and was named Distinguished McKnight University Professor in 1997. He joined Rice University in 1998 as James F. Barbour Professor in Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science. Dr. Tezduyar holds a 1986 Presidential Young Investigator Award from the National Science Foundation. He received the 1997 Computational Mechanics Award of the Japan Society of Mechanical Engineers, 1997 Computational Fluid Dynamics Award of the US Association for Computational Mechanics, and 1998 Computational Mechanics Award of the International Association for Computational Mechanics. He is a Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, US Association for Computational Mechanics, International Association for Computational Mechanics, American Academy of Mechanics, and the School of Engineering at University of Tokyo. He is a member of the Executive Committee of the ASME Applied Mechanics Division and the Executive Council of the International Association for Computational Mechanics. He is an Editor of Computational Mechanics and an Associate Editor of Mathematical Models and Methods in Applied Sciences and the ASME Journal of Applied Mechanics.