DEPLOYMENT CHARACTERISTICS OF CREASED MEMBRANE FOR SOLAR SAIL ON GEOMETRICAL CONFIGURATION AND FOLD PATTERN

The performance of deployment properties on folded membrane structures for solar sail was investigated. The theoretical analyses for one-dimensional Z-fold membrane model were performed as inextensible membrane model with large deformation theory as Elastica problem. The deployment ratio was examined through numerical simulation and experiment. To correct the geometrical effects between uniform strip model and triangular mode, a correction factor based on the aspect ratio of the geometry was introduced, and the results were good agreement with the results of numerical model and experiment one. L-fold membrane model was also examined in the experiments to investigate the deployment performances as two-dimensional deployment membrane model. The results for the L-fold membrane indicate that the two-dimensional deployable membrane has less deployment performance than the one-dimensional one due to the constraint of creases.