Simulation of Deployable Polyhedral Truss

B. Lakshmi Narayana, B. P. Nagaraj and B. S. Nataraju

ABSTRACT: Deployable space structures are made of bays, which concatenate in a repeatable fashion to form a desired structure. Each of these bays undergoes determined relative motion between the links to transform from an initially folded to the deployed configuration. The typical deployable structure is a Deployable Polyhedral Truss (DPT) used for the large antenna. The DPT has 18 bays forming a regular 18-sided polygon. Each bay is a closed loop mechanism with six links with revolute joints and a telescopic member along the diagonal. Each bay is connected to the adjacent bays through gears. The DPT is stowed during launch and is deployed in the orbit. In this paper the deployment simulation of the DPT is studied in ADAMS software. A macro has been developed to model DPT in ADAMS. The same macro can be used to quickly model any DPT with a given number of bays. The redundancy of the various kinematic pairs in the DPT is presented. In addition the differential locking of DPT is simulated and the possible reasons are explored.

KEYWORDS: Deployable Polyhedral Truss (DPT), Degrees of freedom, Differential Latching, Deployment simulation

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