Analysis of landing impact performance for lunar lander based on flexible body

It is necessary to investigate the lunar lander soft-landing by considering the flexible body and legs because the impact of deformation is significant. There is a new method for research on landing impact performance in this paper. Firstly a dynamical model of 1/4 lunar lander with four suspension legs is build and simplified. After getting oscillation equation of the model, founds two simulation models respectively by multi-rigid-body dynamics method and nonlinear finite element method. The simulation of soft-landing selects MSC.ADMAS and MSC.DYTRAN. Main analysis objects are buffer distance of primary strut in lunar lander and vertical acceleration of box's centroid, then contrasts two simulation results based on the objects. Research results show that the influence of flexible body reduces the maximum of primary strut's buffer distance, but amplifies the vertical acceleration of centroid with periodic oscillation.