A MULTIFUNCTIONAL FLEXURE HINGE FOR DEPLOYING OMNIDIRECTIONAL SOLAR ARRAYS

The Aerospace Corporation's DARPA-Aerospace PICOSAT project will, in the near term, deploy a thin-film solar array as a power source for its small satellite. The deployment mechanism for the array is unique because it cannot employ conventional booms, hinges, latches, or stops, due to the extremely limited room available. In order to stow thin-film solar cell arrays in the most compact manner, a flexure hinge made of an extremely flexible metal has been suggested. In this paper, the prior use of the superelastic Ti-Ni alloy for the structure, hinge and unfolding energy device, is extended to include the function of a latch that locks the deployed structure in place and the electrical bus which carries current from the cells back to the satellite. By performing all these functions with a single element, the complexity and cost of the array is reduced, the assembly process is simplified and the reliability increased.