Modeling and Simulation of Supersonic Parachute Inflation in Mars Environment

Parachute plays an important role of aerodynamic deceleration during exploration and landing. In this paper, inflation process of a disk-gap-band parachute in low-density and supersonic airflow is simulated based on the Arbitrary Lagrange Euler (ALE) method. Firstly, the fluid-structure interaction (FSI) numerical model of the parachute has been built. Then, the inflation process is simulated in Mars environment at Ma = 2. The simulation result shows the inflation time is 0.135 s, and after parachute reaches the over inflation stage, the canopy and the suspension line oscillate slightly, which can provide an important reference for the design of Mars parachute.