Development and validation of the multi-body simulation software for the heavy cargo airdrop system

The aim of this paper was to introduce the ADSMS, a multi-body simulation software for the heavy cargo airdrop system and a visual simulation application running on the personal computer, and establish the approach to develop simulation software for the heavy cargo airdrop system (HCADS), which is capable of simulating the entire system from first motion in the aircraft to the cargo landing. An accurate and extensible simulation model with uniform equations of motion suitable for all states during extraction was developed for the cargo extraction phase. A matrix-formed Kane-Huston algorithm based on the dynamics of multibody system integrated with some new techniques was established to model and simulate the motion of the complex parachute-payload system. The approach proposed here can be easily applied to different kinds of airdrop systems. In accordance with the simulation model, a numerical solver was implemented in C++ to read the configuration files of a concrete parachute system and conduct the computation. The algorithm was verified by some cases and experimental data, which included airdrop test for a typical HCADS and other similar parachute systems selected from literatures. A friendly frontinterface incorporated, further more, the post-processing interface of ADSMS consisted of two parts: one was tables and graphs, and the other was a high performance animation environment, which provided the capability to simulate the cargo airdrop process in the physical world based on VTP (Virtual Terrain Project).