Colloquia

Summary

In the modern age satellites gets smaller, require more power and travel to corners of the universe where the solar constant is low, which results in the traditional rigid solar arrays becoming a less viable option. To counter this development, Airbus defence and space Netherlands are developing a new solar array named the flexible compact array. This concept consist of a mast actuated blanket stack, where the blanket stack consists of Kapton foil with carbon fibre reinforcements and solar cells that are folded up in a zigzag pattern. To get an understanding of the deployment behaviour a dynamic simulation is preformed using the floating frame formulation, where flexibility is integrated using modal superposition with Craig-Bampton modes including stress and strain modes. Due to the chaotic deployment behaviour several chaos reduction systems have been developed to ensure a stable deployment.