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 mem-brane model were performed as inextensible membrane model with large deformation theory as Elastica prob-lem. The deployment ratio was examined through nu-merical simulation and experiment. To correct the ge-ometrical effects between uniform strip model and tri-angular mode, a correction factor based on the as-pect ratio of the geometry was introduced, and the re-sults were good agreement with the results of numeri-cal model and experiment one. L-fold membrane model was also examined in the experiments to investigate the deployment performances as two-dimensional de-ployment 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