EnginSoft - Conference Abstracts

EnginSoft Users' Meeting 2006
Le Tecnologie CAE nell'Industria

Solar Sail Membrane Optimization for Improved Propulsion Capabilities

Franchini Francesco - EnginSoft
Perrone G. - Università di Pisa, Dipartimento di Ingegneria Spaziale
Pietra Francesco - EnginSoft
Quarta A. - Università di Pisa, Dipartimento di Ingegneria Spaziale

Abstract

The present paper investigates practical problems usually encountered during design and manufacturing of large and very thin membrane structures for solar sail applications. Propulsion capability of solar sail is linked to the optical reflectivity of film sail as well to the global and local geometry, i.e. the sail shape and the wrinkling effect. The final aim of this research is to obtain a uniform sail loading and a no-wrinkled film configuration in order to improve effectiveness of propulsion. Except for a few simple cases, wrinkling analysis of membranes with general shapes and boundary conditions inevitably requires numerical methods, so the ANSYS finite element code was unavoidably adopted. Well-known selected geometries of effective solar sails were modeled; pre-tensioning and solar pressure were applied, including non linear geometrical effects that are typical of wrinkling membrane. The optimization code modeFRONTIER was successfully integrated with the FEM code in order to quantitatively evaluate the influence of sail size, sail membrane pre-stress and sail membrane thickness on solar sail propulsion performance. Optimized configurations highlighted potential accredited design improvements that were taken as parameters for a more extensive optimization.