Numerical study of lateral wind effect on parachute dropping based on finite element method

The extra wind field is an important factor affecting on parachute dropping. However, the existing test or numerical methods are difficult to investigate this effect. In order to investigate parachute airdropping in lateral wind environment, the explicit finite element method was used to calculate this complicated coupling process. The structure and flow field were discretized by Lagrangian meshes, and the coupling between canopy and air was realized by penalty function. To reduce the calculation amount, the fluid meshes were moved based on local coordinate transformation and the calculation domain was limited in a finite space. While, the boundary conditions were not changed with fluid meshes moving, and a stable lateral wind environment could be simulated. In this paper, the C9 parachute dropping process was calculated based on the above numerical method. This method can also be a reference for parachute design.