COMPUTATIONAL AERODYNAMICS OF A PARATROOPER SEPARATING FROM AN AIRCRAFT

We present the computational methods we have developed for simulation of the aerodynamics of a paratrooper during the time period following immediately after the paratrooper jumps from a cargo aircraft. These methods can also be used for the aerodynamic simulation of a payload, such as a crate of emergency aid or a ground vehicle, being dropped from the rear door of a cargo aircraft. These are applications with major significance in the area of airdrop technology. In both of these cases, the computational challenge is to predict the dynamic behavior and path of the object separating from the aircraft, so that this early stage of the deployment process is successful. The methods we developed to address this challenge are based on the DeformingSpatial-Domain/Stabilized Space-Time formulation, advanced mesh update methods, and parallel computing on distributed memory parallel supercomputers. The preliminary results for the paratrooper deployment and cargo drop demonstrate that these methods can potentially play a major role in simulation of airdrop systems.