Performance of a Single Balloon-Skirt Airbag in Vertical Drops

Abstract

Airbags are currently being investigated by the Army as an alternative to paper honeycomb and retrorockets for soft landing of airdropped payloads. A double-chamber balloon skirt airbag developed by a French company was claimed to provide low impact G forces and ground gliding capability. The performance of an eight balloon-skirt airbag-platform system was investigated in a previous study at NRDEC. The performance of the system was not satisfactory. In an attempt to improve the performance, a single balloon-skirt was modified in the current study and its performance was investigated at various test conditions. Test results showed that the double-chamber design of the balloon- skirt airbag is moderately better than the single-chamber design but its performance is still not as good as the manufacturer claimed.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Jul 01, 1988
Accession Number
ADA198240

Entities

People

  • Calvin K Lee

Organizations

  • United States Army Soldier Systems Center

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Energy and Power Technologies
  • Materials and Manufacturing Processes

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Air Flow
  • Air Gaps
  • Air Pressure
  • Classification
  • Compression
  • Data Acquisition
  • Deceleration
  • Diameters
  • Drop Tests
  • Energy Absorbers
  • Engineering
  • Field Equipment
  • Flow Rate
  • Measurement
  • Security
  • Shape
  • Soft Landings

Readers

  • Aerial Delivery - Logistics and Supply Chain Management.
  • Explosive Engineering.
  • Systems Analysis and Design