Water Landing of Space Flight Re-entry Vehicles Using Abaqus/Explicit

Space flight re-entry vehicles impart highly dynamic loads on the crew and/or payload during a water landing. To understand the behavior of the vehicle/payload system as it makes impact, a predictive framework that can simultaneously model the structure, the highly deformable landing medium (water or soil), and their interaction is required. The coupled Eulerian-Lagrangian (CEL) method in Abaqus/Explicit provides the means for capturing these complex physical phenomena. In this Technology Brief, the simulation of a re-entry vehicle water landing will be demonstrated, and strong agreement with test results will be shown.