Abstract
Thin membranes have negligible bending stiffness, compressive stresses inevitably lead to wrinkling. Therefore, it is important to keep the surface of membrane structures flat in order to guarantee high precision. Edge-trimming is an effective method to passively diminish wrinkles, however a key difficulty in this process is the determination of the optimal trimming level. In this paper, regular polygonal membrane structures subjected to equal radial forces were analyzed, and a new stress field distribution model for arc-edge square membrane structure was proposed to predict the optimal trimming level. This model is simple and applicable to any polygonal membrane structures. Comparison among the results of the finite element analysis, and the experimental and analytical results showed that the proposed model accurately described the stress field distribution and guaranteed that there are no wrinkles appear inside the effective inscribed circle region for the optimal trimming level.
Highlights
Thin-walled membranes are used in many engineering fields, such as space, construction, and skydiving, as lightweight structures.[1]
While Bonin[12] has been able to predict the optimal trimming level by changing the tensile model into a bending analogy model, and the displaced shape is considered under edge-wise rotations, this method is not intuitive, besides, deformation gradients and any intrinsic length changes between a straight-edge model and an arc-edge model are neglected, which may lead to inaccurate results
A new stress field model is proposed, and the optimal trimming level is predicted to ensure that there are no wrinkles appear inside the effective region
Summary
Thin-walled membranes are used in many engineering fields, such as space, construction, and skydiving, as lightweight structures.[1]. While Bonin[12] has been able to predict the optimal trimming level by changing the tensile model into a bending analogy model, and the displaced shape is considered under edge-wise rotations, this method is not intuitive, besides, deformation gradients and any intrinsic length changes between a straight-edge model and an arc-edge model are neglected, which may lead to inaccurate results. A new stress field model used to assumption of the in-plane stress field for arc-edge square membrane structure is proposed, and the optimal trimming level is predicted. This intuitive and simple model guarantees that there are no wrinkles inside the effective region. These results form a solid theoretical basis for the design of the structure
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