Folding and deploying identical thick panels with spring-loaded hinges

Journal article

Many large deployable flat rigid arrays for aerospace applications, e.g., solar panels and reflectarray antennas, are preferably made from identical panels. It is challenging to pack them into a compact bundle before launching and deploy to a flat surface once in the orbit, especially if they are having bi-directional deployments. In this paper, we propose a folding scheme based on the Hamiltonian circuit that can successfully fold a chessboard-like array into a compact package with two stacks of panels without any voids. Since this approach leads to a multiple degrees-of-freedom (DoFs) assembly kinematically, simple spring-loaded hinges are used to synchronise the deployment. An effective optimisation method is subsequently proposed to select the stiffness of rotational joints to ensure a collision-free deployment. Dynamic simulation of the deployment and a collision detection method are incorporated into the optimisation process. By this approach, the trajectories of panels are sequenced to avoid collisions during the deployment, and the array always deploys to a flat surface from packaged stacks. Both the folding schemes and subsequent deployments were validated successfully by experiments. Though we consider only rectangular panels here, the approach can be extended to deployable arrays of any regular shape.

Authors: Yang, J; Zhang, Y; Chatzis, M; You, Z

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: Elsevier
• Journal: Extreme Mechanics Letters
• Volume: 52
• Article number: 101637
• Publication date: 2022-02-02
• Acceptance date: 2022-01-17
• DOI: 10.1016/j.eml.2022.101637
• EISSN: 2352-4316
• Language: English
• Keywords: FFR