Parachute Reliability Assessment and Decision-Making of Experiment Times

Parachute is a core equipment of a recovery and landing system.and requests high reliability.If the success/failure data from the airdrop experiment are only used to assess the reliability of a parachute,a mass of airdrop experiments are necessary.That is unacceptable in the engineering because of the high experiment cost.A new assessing method is proposed in this paper.In this method,the parachute's strength test data is took as the prior information,and integrated with the airdrop experiment information to assess the parachute reliability by Bayesian theory.This method is derived from a strict mathematical theory,and the assessing results are consistent with the parachute's actual situation.The times of airdrop experiments calculated by this method is much less than the classic method,thus decreasing a large number of experiment costs and workloads.The application example have demonstrated the effectiveness of the approach proposed.