FINITE-ELEMENT ANALYSIS OF A SAMARA-WING DECELERATOR

An analytic model of a samara-wing decelerator has been developed that employs a finite element representation of the fabric wing. A method has been derived for iteratively calculating the steady-state descent characteristics from the equations of motion of the system, which is c omposed of the 12 rigid-body degrees of freedom of the centerbody and tip mass together with the translational degrees of freedom of the fab ric nodal masses, Results of calculations are compared with the measur ed descent characteristics of both full-scale submunition simulators a nd subscale wind-tunnel test articles. Agreement between analysis and test results is generally quite good, but failure to predict spin rate in certain cases indicates the need for further fabric modeling effor t.