Abstract
There has been a lot of attention recently on space inflatable membrane structures, because of their excellent characteristics such as lightweight, simple deployment mechanism and high packaging efficiency. Some programs taking the advantages of inflatable structure 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. In this paper, a deployment of the inflatable tube is presented as a numerical example, and the corresponding experimental result is presented too. They have good agreements with each other, which shows the validity of the proposed numerical method.
