Study of a flowerlike deployable structure

Abstract

A deployable structure is a kind of mechanism that can be folded and deployed automatically. It is able to form required shape or curved surface after deployment. In this paper, a flowerlike deployable structure, which forms a circle plane after deployment, was studied. First, the required circle plane was decomposed to determine the shapes of the members. Then the relation expressions were set up, which include the structural dimensions of the members and how to calculate the volume of the mechanism in the folded state. The number of the petals was optimized with the aim of minimizing the volume of the structure in its folded state. In order to determine the connecting forms among the petals and in one petal, the degrees of freedom of the mechanism were studied. On the basis of these analysis results, the flowerlike deployable structure was designed in detail. Using mechanical topology analysis, the mechanism was simplified. Based on the screw theory, the vector form output matrix of the mechanism was built. After analysing its mobility, the driving inputs positions were obtained. Finally, a virtual prototype technology was used to verify the feasibility of the design. © 2013 Journal of Mechanical Engineering.