Fully-Coupled Fluid-Structure Interaction Simulations of a Supersonic Parachute

A validated computational fluid-structure interaction method for simulating the complex interaction between the large deformation of very thin, highly deformable structures and compressible flows is extended to consider large-scale problems in supersonic flows using parallel computing. The coupled fluid-structure interaction system is solved in a partitioned, or weakly-coupled, manner. The foundations of the applied fluid-structure interaction method are a higher-order, block-structured Cartesian, sharp immersed boundary method for the compressible Navier-Stokes equations and a computational structural dynamics solver employing a geometrically nonlinear 3-node shell element based on the mixed interpolation of tensorial components formulation. The method is applied to large deformation fluid-structure interaction validation cases before being applied to the inflation of a supersonic parachute in the upper Martian atmosphere where the goal is to demonstrate the capabilities of the solver when considering large-scale problems in supersonic flows.