Folding, stowage, and deployment of composite thin-walled lenticular tubes

Abstract

Composite thin-walled lenticular tube (CTLT) is a lightweight foldable and deployable structural material that enables large-scale deployable mechanisms for various space missions. A key step toward the structural design of CTLT is to understand its folding, stowage, and deployment behaviors. This work presents an integrated experimental and numerical investigation of the dynamic deployment behavior of CTLT that wraps around a central hub, with emphasis on the effect of long-term storage. A two-meter-long CTLT prototype was manufactured, and a gravity compensation system was designed and built for the on-ground dynamic deployment experiments. The deployment experiments were performed on the CTLT prototype both before and after it had been stowed for extended storage periods. The results indicate that after being stowed for 6 and 10.5 months the CTLT is deployed slower and the deployment time increases by 8.2% and 15.0%, respectively. Furthermore, a high-fidelity numerical model was constructed using the explicit dynamic finite element method, where the CTLT was modeled as a deformable part and the folding/deployment mechanisms were modeled as rigid bodies to perform the folding, stowage, and deployment simulations. The long-term storage effect was accounted for in the numerical analyses with the use of a viscoelastic fiber-reinforced composite material model, and a good agreement has been achieved between the experimental and numerical results.