Solar power sail membrane prototype for OKEANOS mission

Matsushita, Masanori; Chujo, Toshihiro; Matsumoto, Jun; Mori, Osamu; Yokota, Rikio; Toyota, Hiroyuki; Satou, Yasutaka; Okuizumi, Nobukatsu; Kato, Hideki; Nakamura, Tetsuya; Shibata, Yuichi; Nakao, Tatsuro; Mori, K.; Fujii, Sanae; Takao, Yuki; Kubo, Yasunori; Miyamoto, Yuya; Nada, Yuichiro; Motegi, Risa; Ohira, Genki; Kimishima, Yudai

doi:10.1016/j.asr.2020.10.007

Cited by 11 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 6 publications

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“…After the success of "IKAROS," JAXA proposed a new generation of the solar sail spacecraft named "OKEANOS" aiming at exploring a Jupiter Trojan asteroid. 2 Later in 2011, 2015, and 2019, the USA launched "NanoSail-D2," "LightSail-1," and "LightSail-2," respectively. [3][4][5] Each of them used a Cu-beSat platform.…”

Section: Application Of Solar Sails In Aerospacementioning

confidence: 99%

High-precision numerical calculation method of solar radiation pressure force for wrinkled solar sails

Zou

Wang

2022

Proceedings of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, Part G:

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Due to small magnitude of solar radiation pressure (SRP), the area-mass ratio of the solar sail should be large enough to obtain adequate thrust acceleration. Therefore, the membrane structure is usually adopted for solar sails. However, the membrane barely has out-of-plane stiffness; thus, it is necessary to apply in-plane tension on the membrane for maintaining the plane, which may result in wrinkles. The wrinkle will influence SRP force of solar sails. On the one hand, wrinkled regions of the sail are no longer flat, so the angle between the normal vector of the surface in wrinkled regions and the direction of sunlight differ from a flat sail. On the other hand, wrinkles may cause shadow when the solar sail is almost parallel to sunlight and the shadow region cannot generate SRP force. In this paper, the nonlinear buckling theory is used to propose a numerical calculation method to solve the problem of wrinkling analysis of solar sails with complex boundary. Then, a high-precision method for calculating SRP force of wrinkled solar sails is proposed, consisting of two parts: the infinitesimal element SRP force model and the wrinkle shading model. Numerical simulation result verifies the effectiveness of the wrinkling analysis method and the SRP force calculation method. Furthermore, according to calculation result, wrinkles have a certain influence on the SRP force of the solar sail, which will become significant when the solar sail gets parallel to sunlight.

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