太阳帆自旋展开是一项新的空间技术。它利用自旋离心力展开折叠的太阳帆薄膜,并使其保持展开后的位形,从而可省略额外支撑结构,有效减少结构重量,降低展开能耗。在这项技术进行在轨试验和用于航天任务之前,必须对其进行充分的动力学地面模拟试验。介绍了如何设计和研制太阳帆自旋展开与控制系统,制作了不同的太阳帆模型,分别在常规气压下和真空舱中进行太阳帆自旋展开动力学地面模拟试验。通过多组试验,得到了可完整、稳定展开太阳帆模型的方法。试验时在真空舱底部和侧面布置两台高速相机,拍摄各个时段的展开过程。经过图像处理和分析,得到了第一展开阶段帆面展开长度随时间的变化关系和第二展开阶段的帆面动态响应。通过建立简化的动力学模型并进行分析,解释了第二展开阶段帆面产生较大面内外振动的原因。
The spinning deployment of solar sails is a new space technique,which utilizes the centrifugal force of spinning to de-ploy the sail membranes stowed in a spiral folding status and to sustain the configuration of fully deployed membranes.This technique,hence,has the advantages of light weight and low energy consumption because it does not need any extra supportive structure.Sufficient ground simulation tests for the spinning deployment dynamics and control of a solar sail are significantly important for this technique before it is tested on orbit and applied to any space missions.This paper presents how to design and realize the ground simulation test for spinning deployment dynamics of a solar sail model,including deployment and control devices,as well as several kinds of sail membranes.The paper also presents the ground simulation tests of spinning deploy-ment of a solar sail model either under the normal atmospheric pressure or in a vacuum chamber.Repeated ground simulation tests verify the approach to deploy the sail membranes fully and smoothly.The photos taken by two high-speed cameras,from horizontal and vertically directions respectively,enable one to observe the spinning deployment process and analyze both the length of deployed membranes with respective to time and the dynamic response of membranes in the second deployment stage via digital image processing.A simplified dynamic model is established to explain the sever out-of-plane vibration observed in the second stage of deployment.