DYNAMIC MODELING OF FOLDED DEPLOYABLE SPACE STRUCTURES WITH FLEXIBLE HINGES

A modeling approach for capturing the three-dimensional deployment dynamics of complex folded deployable structures with flexible hinges on spacecraft is developed. This paper provides an initial investigation on how to model flexible hinges that connect rigid panels. Such hinges are emerging as a promising use of composite materials to create novel folded structures. The nonlinear multi-body dynamics is studied and described using an energy-based approach and parameterizations developed for attitude dynamics and control to better understand how the structure's motion affects the spacecraft. While this study assumes a simple hinge-response behavior, the dynamical formulation is general enough to substitute experimentally derived response functions in future efforts.