Simulation of several flying situations of paragliders

Abstract

Paragliding is an adventure and fascinating sport of flying paragliders. Paragliders can be launched by running from a slope or by a winch force from towing vehicles, using gravity forces as the motor for the motion of flying. This motion is governed by the gravity forces as well as time-varying aerodynamic ones which depend on the states of the motion of paraglider at each instant of time. There are few published articles considering mechanical problems of paragliders in their various flying situations. This article represents the mathematical modeling and simulation of several common flying situations of a paraglider through establishing and solving the governing differential equations in state-space. Those flying situations include the ones with constant headwind/tailwind with or without constant upwind; the ones with different scenario for the variations of headwind and tailwind combined with the upwind; the ones with varying pilot mass; and the ones whose several parameters are in the form of interval quantities. The simulations were conducted using a powerful Julia toolkit called DifferentialEquations.jl. The obtained results in each situation are discussed, and some recommendations are presented.

Keywords:

paraglider; simulation; modeling; state-space; ordinary differential equations; Julia; DifferentialEquations.jl