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

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.