A Wrinkle-Free Approach of Thin-Film Structures Through Cutting Edges of Rectangle Membrane

The deployable structures are developing in the direction of large-scale, lightweight and high precision. The membrane structures have been used widely in large deployable space structures due to its unique advantages in high stowing efficiency and lightweight, like solar sail, the sunshields, the large solar arrays, and the large membrane antenna. Due to its negligible bending stiffness, wrinkling will occur on membrane surface very easily when the structure is applying the press load. The presence of wrinkles on membrane may influence the shape precision and mechanical behavior of the structures. Therefore simulating the wrinkling on membrane correctly and studying the mechanism and development law of wrinkling is helpful to control the membrane wrinkling effectively. Firstly, this study introduces the primary theory and method on wrinkling, including the Tension filed theory and buckling theory. Then the numerical simulation about rectangle membrane applied by uniaxial load has been performed. The amplitude and wavelength of wrinkling have been obtained by an eigenvalue bucking analysis. Next, in order to eliminate wrinkles, a method has been proposed which cuts the edge of the rectangle membrane. Wrinkle-free membrane has been realized, which has been confirmed by experiment and simulation both and the result are well consistent. It is found that totally no wrinkling can be realized by optimizing the arch height ratio value.