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Published August 2013 | public
Journal Article

Folding, Stowage, and Deployment of Viscoelastic Tape Springs

Abstract

This paper presents an experimental and numerical study of the folding, stowage, and deployment behavior of viscoelastic tape springs. Experiments show that during folding the relationship between load and displacement is nonlinear and varies with rate and temperature. In particular, the limit and propagation loads increase with the folding rate but decrease with temperature. During stowage, relaxation behavior leads to a reduction in internal forces that significantly impacts the subsequent deployment dynamics. The deployment behavior starts with a short, dynamic transient that is followed by a steady deployment and ends with a slow creep recovery. Unlike elastic tape springs, localized folds in viscoelastic tape springs do not move during deployment. Finite-element simulations based on a linear viscoelastic constitutive model with an experimentally determined relaxation modulus are shown to accurately reproduce the experimentally observed behavior, and to capture the effects of geometric nonlinearity, time and temperature dependence.

Additional Information

© 2013 by Kawai Kwok and Sergio Pellegrino. Published by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Inc., with permission. Presented as Paper 2011-2022 at the 52nd AIAA SDM Conference, Denver, CO, 4–7 April 2011; received 9 August 2012; revision received 6 January 2013; accepted for publication 10 January 2013; published online 9 May 2013. The authors thank Wolfgang Knauss (California Institute of Technology) for helpful discussions. The award of a doctoral research fellowship from the Croucher Foundation (Hong Kong) to Kawai Kwok is gratefully acknowledged.

Additional details

Created:
August 19, 2023
Modified:
October 24, 2023