DEPLOYMENT ANLAYSIS OF SOLAR ARRAY SYSTEM THROUGH FLEXIBLE MULTI-BODY DYNAMIC APPROACH

Over the years, considerable research efforts have been made to reduce the weight of spacecraft structures because of its astronomical launching cost. As a result, flexible structures are increasingly utilized in spacecraft structures such as satellite. Of these, a solar array system is one of the most flexible structures in spacecraft structures. Usually, the solar array system is stowed in folded shape when the spacecraft is launched, and it is deployed after entering into orbit. Since the solar array system provides most of the power required in spacecrafts for their mission, the failure in deployment of solar array system directly leads to mission failure of spacecrafts. Therefore, reliable deployment analysis, which can take into account the flexibility of solar array system appropriately, is indispensable for design of solar array system. However, rigid body dynamic approach or mode based approach, which are not fully consider the flexibility of structures, are customarily adopted in industries, and the flexible multi-body dynamic approach is rarely utilized in spite of its advantage in dealing with flexibility of structures. Based on the reason, the flexible multi-body dynamic approach is fully adopted for design of solar array system in this work. In deployment analysis of satellite solar array system, the explicit flexible multi-body dynamic analysis module in commercial software ABAQUS™ is utilized, and some part of analysis results are compared with those obtained from the rigid multi-body dynamic analysis. From the results, it is observed that the flexible multi-body dynamic approach is highly recommendable for design of flexible solar array systems.