article · English
Stability Research on Parachutes Using Digital and Analog Computers
NASA technical translation (TT F-10,391) of a 1963 German conference paper by R. Ludwig, presented at the International Symposium on Analog and Digital Techniques Applied to Aeronautics in Liege, Belgium. The paper investigates the dynamic stability of parachutes using nonlinear equations of motion solved on both digital computers (IBM 650, Siemens 2002, using Runge-Kutta) and an analog computer, covering approximately 80 computed cases. It demonstrates that linearization is fundamentally inadequate for describing parachute oscillation dynamics and that analog and digital computation together are essential for this class of nonlinear flight mechanics problems.
parachute stabilitynonlinear differential equationsanalog computationflight mechanics