New design and dynamic analysis for deploying rolled booms with thin wall

A mechanism was designed to control the deployment speed of the rolled boom, and the efficacy of the mechanism was experimentally verified. The new mechanism includes two rigid plates, two flexible plates, and two rods. Typically, the rigid plates can be made of lightweight and hard material, analogous to aluminum. In addition, a new modeling method was proposed to predict the dynamic behavior of the deployment process of the rolled boom by using experimentally determined parameters. The computational results were consistent with the experimental ones. The moment parameters obtained from the experiment of an inflatable rolled boom 1.6 m long were also useful in simulating a longer boom. The new model enables one to simulate the deployment of an inflatable rolled boom in microgravity environment and the coupling dynamics between the rolled boom and the main spacecraft.