The specificity of personal rescue and reserve parachutes is the fact that they are practically never used for jumping during their service life as they are intended for use only in emergency situations. Therefore, these parachutes throughout the entire period of use are only periodically aired and repacked every 6-12 months. Airing and repacking is necessary even if the parachute is only stored. Rescue and reserve parachutes’ components wear unevenly because the canopy with the suspension lines is inside the container and the cover, while the external components of the harness and the container undergo typical operational wear. Therefore, the service life of rescue parachutes can even reach 20 years (this refers to the canopy with the suspension lines alone). During normal exploitation, parachutes are subjected to non-destructive visual and tactile inspection in preparation for packing. When a parachute reaches its maximum service life, extension of its service life can be calculated based on its technical condition. The procedure for extending parachute’s service life involves non-destructive tests at a fabric air permeability test stand and partially destructive tests at the strength test stand. In the paper, both methods are described and their advantages and disadvantages are discussed. Also, observations some regarding the packers’ work and the desired new properties of raw materials that could be introduced to the parachute industry are presented.
In this work, the authors continue researching issues related to fatigue of aircraft structures made of fabrics. Parachute systems are widely used in military, sport and recreational aviation. Braking parachutes as well as skydiving and troop parachutes are characterized by the repeated use of parachute canopies, which are exposed to wear and fatigue. Until now, parachutes were difficult to design aviation systems due to their complex and unsteady opening characteristics, large changes in the geometry of canopies, suspension lines and tape risers as well as exposure to stochastic atmospheric turbulence. The fatigue of the canopy fabric, suspension lines and tape risers is a problem that must be addressed by textile designers and designers of reusable parachute systems. The authors of this work demonstrate the complexity of operating a parachute in hard multiple use conditions and propose ways to extend the parachute’s service life without compromising safety.
Parachute systems are in widespread use in aviation. Up to now, parachutes are the most uncertain air vehicles because of their complex and unsteady opening characteristics, changes in geometry up to 30% and vulnerability from unsteady atmospheric turbulence. Fatigue is a problem that the designers of long living parachute systems need to cope with. Authors demonstrate complexity of parachute exploitation and means to lower opening forces and extend service life without influencing safety.
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