Deployment dynamics of inflatable tube

Abstract

There has been a lot of attention recently on space inflatable membrane structures, because they have the excellent characteristics such as lightweight, simple deployment mechanisms, and high packaging efficiency, and also because the manufacturing technology has progressed. Some programs taking the advantages of inflatable structures have been suggested already. Researches on material, strength and shape accuracy after deployment have been progressing fairly. However, deployment dynamics of inflatable structures has not been researched adequately. This paper shows a numerical method of analyzing the deployment motion of inflatable membrane structures. The presented method is based on finite element procedure taking into account the interaction of the deformation of the membrane and the pressure of the inflation gas. It adopts a conservation algorithm of energy and momentum to stabilize the numerical time integration. Numerical examples and the corresponding experimental results are presented. They have good agreements with each other, which shows the validity of the proposed numerical method.