Assessment of Soil Modeling Capability for Orion Contingency Land Landing
Publication: Journal of Aerospace Engineering
Volume 25, Issue 1
Abstract
Twenty-one swing tests were conducted at the NASA Langley Landing and Impact Research (LandIR) Facility in 2006 to evaluate Orion boilerplate ground landings as a function of impact velocity and pitch. In this article, experimental results from two capsule swing tests and three vertical drop tests are compared with numerical results. The numerical results were derived by using the nonlinear dynamic finite-element code LS-DYNA. The swing tests were conducted at 0° and pitch, impacting a level soil mat at a (58 fps) horizontal velocity and (5 fps) vertical impact velocity. Three vertical drop tests were conducted with the boilerplate capsule at 0° pitch. Each test was conducted to measure the impact on a level soil mat with varying impact velocities: , , and (12, 24, and 36 fps). Results of the study show the potential of using numerical modeling for vertical drop test and swing test simulations. Discrepancies between the numerical and experimental simulations primarily stem from the nonuniformity and complexity of soil behavior.
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Acknowledgments
The first writer expresses his gratitude to the National Institute of Aerospace (NIA) and NASA Langley for a grant during the summer of 2008 to enable collaboration between the University of Arkansas and NASA. The writers wish to acknowledge the Orion Landing Advanced Development Program (ADP) for funding this work. The writers acknowledge the LandIR testing team for providing the experimental data used in this article. In addition, the writers wish to acknowledge Mercedes Reaves of the NASA Structural Dynamics Branch for developing the initial boilerplate finite-element model.
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Information & Authors
Information
Published In
Journal of Aerospace Engineering
Volume 25 • Issue 1 • January 2012
Pages: 125 - 131
Copyright
© 2012 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: Sep 10, 2009
Accepted: Oct 27, 2010
Published online: Oct 29, 2010
Published in print: Jan 1, 2012
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