I knew some people who worked near this specialty in aerospace. From what I remember, it's highly guarded and sensitive due to the rarity of skills and knowled

I knew some people who worked near this specialty in aerospace. From what I remember, it's highly guarded and sensitive due to the rarity of skills and knowledge required. The problem is highly nonlinear from both an aerodynamics and structural perspective. The fabric changes shape, can only really support a load in tension, and updates of the geometry then feed back into aerodynamics. I'm trying to imagine how they deal with vibrations/flutter related issues (they may not even be called that on flexible fabric, I haven't checked) where everything has to be solved in the time domain to get Real Answers. We're talking modern day supercomputers and constantly having to reduce time step size to keep solutions faster than the Nyquist frequency on a huge problem set where you have to save a lot of the intermediate results somewhere. Then there are all kinds of other things to worry about that someone more experienced with compressible flow can talk about, and its associated nondimensional simulation parameters and issues... It's hard enough with incompressible liquids in confined spaces with metals that can only bend and deflect so much. That is an area I'm more familiar with, and know where to look in handbooks to get initial solutions. But parachutes? Whew. Complex.