Development of an efficient contact-friction model for high-fidelity cargo airdrop simulation

High-fidelity cargo airdrop simulation requires the contact dynamics between an aircraft and a cargo to be modeled accurately. This paper presents a general and efficient contact-friction model for simulation of aircraft-cargo coupling dynamics during airdrops. The proposed approach has the same essence as that of the finite element node-to-segment contact formulation, which leads to a flexible, straight forward, and efficient code implementation. The formulation is developed under an arbitrary moving frame with both the aircraft and the cargo being treated as general six-degree-of-freedom rigid bodies, and thus it eliminates the restrictions of lateral symmetric assumptions in most existing methods. Moreover, the aircraft-cargo coupling algorithm is discussed in detail, and some practical implementation details are presented. The accuracy and capability of the present method are demonstrated through three numerical examples with increasing complexity and fidelity.