Folding, stowage, and deployment of composite thin-walled lenticular tubes

This paper presents an integrated experimental and numerical investigation of the dynamic deployment behavior of Composite thin-walled lenticular tube (CTLT) that wraps around a central hub, with emphasis on the effect of long-term storage. The deployment experiments were performed on the CTLT prototype both before and after it had been stowed for extended storage periods. The results indicate that after being stowed for 6 and 10.5 months the CTLT is deployed slower and the deployment time increases by 8.2% and 15.0%, respectively. Furthermore, a high-fidelity numerical model was constructed using the explicit dynamic finite element method to perform the folding, stowage, and deployment simulations. The long-term storage effect was accounted for in the numerical analyses with the use of a viscoelastic fiber-reinforced composite material model, and a good agreement has been achieved between the experimental and numerical results.

We publicize all the data and codes via the link  https://github.com/XJTU-Zhou-group/CTLT-Dynamic-Deployment.

The open-accessed paper could be found here.