宮﨑 康行

The Inflatable beam made of thin-membrane is folded with a manual step, and it is likely that variety of deployment behavior caused by a manual step is downplayed at the scene of development. So we suggest design of inflatable beam on the basis of Quality Engineering so as to regard unevenness of fold, which can improve some problems such as quantitative evaluation of deployment repeatability. In this way, we confirmed reducing unevenness in the ground-based experiment with deployment.

This paper describes experimental studies and analytical approach for bending rigidity of Multi-Cellular Inflatable (MCI) panel. The experimental studies were carried out to investigate the bending rigidity of MCI panel under 4-point bending load. And finally, we analyzed the bending rigidity of MCI panels by a simple model.

One of the key technologies to develop gossamer space structures is the prediction of wrinkling and slack. The wrinkle is essentially the elastic buckling. The wrinkle has been analyzed numerically based on finite element method with shell elements. But it takes high computational cost. Therefore, the membrane elements, which ignore the bending stiffness and consider only the inplane stress, have been employed to reduce the computational cost. In the finite element analysis of the wrinkle with membrane elements, the compressive stiffness is ignored to simulate the post-buckling stress state in the wrinkled region. This paper provides the mathematical theory to take into account the small but non-zero compressive stiffness of the membrane. The numerical results show that the compressive stiffness is necessary to predict the wrinkled region appropriately.