Air-Deployable Disaster Relief Station

One droppable housing that gives first responders power, comms, medical supplies, and survival gear where there's no road access — dropped from an aircraft and slowed enough to land intact.

Final assembly, parachute packed above the payload housing.

The brief asked for a deployable disaster-relief package that survives an air drop and is self-sufficient once on the ground. The approach: pack everything a stranded group needs for the first 24–48 hours into one housing, size the parachute/airbag system so the drop itself doesn't destroy the payload, and run enough structural analysis to justify that the housing survives worst-case touchdown.

4×impact FOS (30 kN design load)
~6.2 m/sterminal velocity, parachute deployed
1.83 mmmax FEA deformation, worst case
4modules in one housing

Four modules, one housing

1 — Power & comms	LiPo pack (3,685–4,914 Wh, ~30.7 kg), Raspberry Pi 5 telemetry dashboard, ham radio + antenna, GPS, hand-crank generator, folding solar panel. ~37–49 h endurance at 100 W average.
2 — Medical & sustenance	First-aid stock, dehydrated rations, a water purification unit (~2.76 kg dry).
3 — Survival kit	Knife, rope, fire starter, flare gun, life jackets, thermal/IR camera for locating survivors.
4 — Deployment	Parachute + CO₂-cannister airbag system, plus the final housing packaging the other three modules.

Module packing layout inside the housing — all four modules stacked into one drop-capable unit.

All parts are modeled as separate SolidWorks components (.SLDPRT / .SLDASM) and assembled into the final unit — ham radio box and antenna, GPS module, first-aid kit, food kit, two water-filter variants, a folding solar panel, rope, flare gun, IR camera, and the casing/airbag geometry itself.

Descent and impact

Free-fall terminal velocity (m = 75 kg, C_d = 0.6, no parachute): ~30.7 m/s. With the parachute open (effective canopy area 1.82 m², C_d = 1.75): ~6.19 m/s.

CFD velocity field during parachute descent

CFD velocity field during descent — ~6 m/s terminal velocity, matching the hand calculation.

Deployed configuration, parachute above the payload housing.

At a 10 m/s touchdown over 0.5 m of airbag stopping distance, impact force works out to 7,500 N (a = v²/2d = 100 m/s², F = ma = 75 × 100 = 7,500 N); the FEA corner-impact cases were run at a 30,000 N design load, a 4× margin.

Corner-impact case	One corner	Two corners	All four corners
Max deformation	0.80 mm	1.83 mm	~1.0 mm

FEA deformation, all-four-corner impact case — within deformation limits at the 4× design load.

CAD-only submission — never built or drop-tested as a physical prototype. FEA cases are idealized rigid-corner strikes (no soil/water compliance), and the parachute/airbag release mechanism is CAD geometry only, with no sizing calculation behind the CO₂ inflation system.

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