Combining numerical analysis and engineering judgment to design deployable structures

A Systematic Design Methodology for Deployable Structures

“…In [39] it is explained how scaling a lightweight structure as a whole will affect the design of structural parts. The design methodology proposed here for deployable structures is largely based on these concepts, and makes use of the specific geometric and structural behaviour characteristics of deployable structures that are described in other publications of the authors [13,14,22,23,16,17,18,19,21,20,25,26,15,12,24]. The proposed generic design methodology for deployable structures of any shape is illustrated in Figure 3.…”

“…Finally, the idea of using simple approximate models [18,21,20] in the early and intermediate stages of the iterative design process is applied by using deployment analyses of single units to predict the response of multi-unit structures. Exact finite element analysis of the full structure during the deployment process can then be performed in the final design stage for a limited number of times.…”

“…Since these two objectives contradict each other, iterations are necessary until a balanced behaviour is achieved. The authors have been studying the behaviour of these structures during the last few years [13,14,22,23,16,17,18,19,21,20,25,26,15,12,24]. This paper contains their final recommendations on a design methdology that aims at reducing the number of iterations and the required computational effort.…”

Geometric design of arbitrarily curved bi-stable deployable arches with discrete joint size

“…The concept as well as the geometric and structural characteristics of the type of deployable structures considered here are the product of research work carried out since 1985 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Technion in Israel and the National Technical University of Athens (Gantes, 1991;Gantes et al, 1991;Gantes et al, 1994a;Gantes, 2000a), that succeeded in converting the primary ideas that were suggested earlier (Krishnapillai and Zalewski, 1985) to a feasible type of structure. The main findings of this work are included in a recent book (Gantes, 2001).…”

Mechanism-Based Approach for the Deployment of a Tensegrity-Ring Module

“…Most deployable systems are composed of single degree of freedom deployable units such as pantographic mechanisms or scissor-like elements. Gantes et al (1991;1989) studied deployable structures having scissor-like elements. Studies revealed nonlinearity during deployment, high sensitivity and unbalanced force distribution (Gantes 2001).…”