Stepwise deployment of membrane structures with rolled-up booms: Experiments and simulations

In this paper, simple deployable structures are introduced, which consist of polygonal membranes and elastic booms deployed by only releasing the rolled-up booms in stepwise manners. The membranes are folded up with modified spiral folding patterns to fit the arrangement of booms. The booms are newly-developed bi-convex tapes covered by braids. Basic mechanical test results of the booms are first presented. Deployment experiments of a small conceptual model are demonstrated for several configurations. Numerical simulations of the deployment experiments are also performed employing multi-particle approximation method for membranes and a discrete model for one-dimensional continuum for the booms. The results are compared with the experimental results and the deployment behaviors of the structures are discussed.