The thesis focuses on special space--time computational techniquesintroduced recently for computational aerodynamics modeling of flapping wings of an actual locust. These techniques complement the Deforming-Spatial-Domain/Stabilized Space--Time (DSD/SST) formulation, which is the core computational technique. The DSD/SST formulation was developed for flows with moving interfaces, and the version used in the computations is "DST/SST-VMST," which is the space--time version of the residual-based variational multiscale (VMS) method. The special space--time techniques are based on using NURBS basis functions for the temporal representation of the motion of the locust wings. The motion data is extracted from the high-speed video recordings of a locust in a wind tunnel. In addition, temporal NURBS basis functions are used in representation of the motion of the volume meshes computed and also in remeshing. These ingredients provide an accurate and e fficient way of dealing with the wind tunnel data and the mesh. The thesis includes a detailed study on how the spatial and temporal resolutions influence the quality of the numerical solution.

To increase aerodynamic performance, the geometric porosity of a ringsail spacecraft parachute canopy is sometimes increased, beyond the "rings" and "sails" with hundreds of "ring gaps" and "sail slits." This creates extra computational challenges for fluid--structure interaction (FSI) modeling of clusters of such parachutes, beyond those created by the lightness of the canopy structure, geometric complexities of hundreds of gaps and slits, and the contact between the parachutes of the cluster. In FSI computation of parachutes with such "modified geometric porosity," the flow through the "windows" created by the removal of the panels and the wider gaps created by the removal of the sails cannot be accurately modeled with the Homogenized Modeling of Geometric Porosity (HMGP), which was introduced to deal with the hundreds of gaps and slits. The flow needs to be actually resolved. All these computational challenges need to be addressed simultaneously in FSI modeling of clusters of spacecraft parachutes with modified geometric porosity. The core numerical technology is the Stabilized Space--Time FSI (SSTFSI) technique, and the contact between the parachutes is handled with the Surface-Edge-Node Contact Tracking (SENCT) technique. In the computations reported here, in addition to the SSTFSI and SENCT techniques and HMGP, we use the special techniques we have developed for removing the numerical spinning component of the parachute motion and for restoring the mesh integrity without a remesh. We present results for 2- and 3-parachute clusters with two different payload models. We also present the FSI computations we carried out for a single, subscale modified-porosity parachute.