Experimental and numerical study on rapid inflation process of air-launched balloon

Abstract

The rapid inflation process is the most important stage in the whole working process of rapid deployment of aerostat. However, it is difficult to reveal its mechanical mechanism by existing experimental and numerical methods and reasonably explain the damage and helium leakage during the inflation process. An air-launched balloon for rapid deployment was designed and manufactured, and the related ground steady inflation experiment was carried out in this work. Then, the rapid inflation process of the folded balloon was studied by using the Simplified Arbitrary Lagrangian- Eulerian (SALE) method. Here, the folded balloon model was obtained by the reverse folding method. The structure and flow field were described by Lagrangian elements, and the coupling between them was obtained by a contact algorithm. The numerical results were in good agreement with the experimental results. The numerical method in this work could obtain abundant information on the structure and flow field which couldn’t be obtained by the experimental method. The change law of structure and flow field was obtained and the failure mechanism in the destructive experiment was explained. The numerical method proposed in this work could provide a reference for the material selection, gas source selection and structure optimization of the rapid deployment aerostat system.