Development simulation of an inflatable membrane antenna based on extended position-based dynamics

基于扩展位置动力学的充气薄膜天线研制仿真

Inflatable membrane antennas have been extensively applied in space missions;however,the simulation methods are not perfect,and many simulation methods still have many difficulties in accuracy,efficiency,and stability.Therefore,the extended position-based dynamics(XPBD)method is employed and improved for the simulation of folded inflatable structures in this paper.To overcome the problem that the original XPBD method with only geometric constraints does not contain any mechanical information and cannot reflect the mechanical characteristics of the structure,we improve the XPBD method by introducing the strain energy constraint.Due to the complicated nonlinear characteristics of the membrane structures,the results with the traditional finite element method(Abaqus)cannot converge,while the tension field theory(TFT)can,but some pretreatments are needed.Compared with them,the method in this paper is simple and has better stability to accurately predict the displacement,stress,and wrinkle region of the membrane structure.In addition,the present method is also compared with the experiment in the reference to verify the feasibility of the folded tube simulation.Finally,the present method is applied to simulate inflatable membrane antennas and analyze the deployable driving force and deployable process sequence of each component.

充气薄膜天线在空间任务中得到了广泛的应用,然而,目前的仿真方法还不完善,许多仿真方法在精度、效率和稳定性方面仍存在诸多困难.本文采用并改进了扩展的基于位置的动力学(XPBD)方法对折叠充气结构进行仿真.为了克服原有的仅具有几何约束的XPBD方法不包含任何力学信息,不能反映结构的力学特性的问题,我们通过引入应变能约束对XPBD方法进行了改进.由于膜结构复杂的非线性特性,传统的有限元方法(Abaqus)不能收敛,而张力场理论(TFT)可以收敛,但需要进行一些预处理.与之相比,本文方法简单,稳定性好,能够准确预测膜结构的位移、应力和起皱区域.此外,还将本文方法与文献中的实验结果进行了比较,验证了折叠管模拟的可行性.最后,利用该方法对充气薄膜天线进行了仿真,分析了各部件的展开驱动力和展开过程顺序.