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Original Date: 01/23/1995
Revision Date: 01/18/2007
Information : Laydown Weapons Parachutes
Sandia has maintained the responsibility for development, production, and stockpile maintenance for Laydown Weapons Parachutes since 1987. To complement this mission, Sandia has a Parachute Development Laboratory and a Parachute Materials Quality Assurance Laboratory which provides analysis and experience in high-speed, low-level Aerodynamic Deceleration Systems.
The key components of the development mission are to provide a complete design (technical data package) which may require Prototype Fabrication and Packaging, testing, and Design for Manufacturability characteristics. For the production mission, Sandia is responsible for complete deployment and maintenance of technical drawings, technical manuals, and quality assurance documents. In addition, the group is responsible for the development and maintenance of training of parachute packers and inspectors. Lastly, as part of Sandia's stockpile maintenance role, reviews of Joint Test Assembly Test Data, Aging Studies, and continuation of consultant roles for defect reporting from the field are conducted.
Sandia has supported DOD and NASA in assisting various deployment systems in parachute designs and analysis. Payloads up to 175K pounds including weapons, cargo, reusable hardware, instrumentation, and personnel represent some of the diverse experience Sandia possesses.
Sandia is, through the DOE Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative (ASCI), developing physical understanding and computational models of the fluid dynamics of parachute inflation processes. These processes are being developed into a parachute performance prediction simulation code which include models of parachute deployment, inflation, loads, canopy stresses and system trajectory. The material data base can be adjusted to predict the performance of aging stockpile parachutes. To assure future availability of needed parachuted technology, Sandia is documenting today's parachute inflation research as part of tomorrow's parachute design tools. These parachute design tools are shortening the parachute design cycle time and reducing costs.
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