NASA Ames shares LAVA parachute CFD for supersonic inflation
NASA Ames published demo material on the LAVA team’s CFD tool used to simulate supersonic parachute inflation for Mars payloads, including validation vs flight tests shared. The post stresses modelling of deployment behind payloads at high speeds and matching test data—useful work for anyone modelling transient, compressible‑flow cloth/structure interaction. The demo underscores how high‑fidelity CFD and flight validation are paired for supersonic deceleration systems.
NASA’s LAVA team documented direct comparisons between their coupled CFD–structural simulations and ASPIRE flight measurements from the SR03 test campaign, showing the tool was exercised specifically against those flight datasets. nas.nasa.gov The LAVA framework was reported to run fluid–structure simulations at scale — “hundreds of millions” of degrees of freedom in some cases — by using a Cartesian immersed‑boundary solver with adaptive mesh refinement. nas.nasa.gov Validation work submitted to NASA’s technical reports catalog lists the LAVA parachute capability validation versus ASPIRE flight data and identifies authors including Jonathan Boustani, François Cadieux, Michael Barad, and Cetin Kiris. ntrs.nasa.gov Peer‑reviewed and conference papers describe LAVA’s handling of cloth specifics: initial folding patterns, compressibility‑dependent fabric porosity, and line/canopy interactions within an Eulerian FSI formulation. arxiv.org A 2025 Ames seminar on LAVA names Michael F. Barad and Jared Duensing among leads and explicitly states the code is “gearing up for public release,” with an outreach contact listed for access inquiries. ntrs.nasa.gov Technical highlights called out in recent LAVA summaries include wall‑modeled LES capability, Cartesian shell‑element FSI, AMR, and plans for GPU porting and mixed‑precision performance improvements. sciencedirect.com
