Buckling and wrinkling of inflatable support structure of deployable antenna

The inflatable support structure is the major load-carrying component for deployable antenna to resist the external loads. One of the keys to design a precision deployable antenna is to accurately evaluate the buckling characteristics of inflatable support structure. In this paper, we propose a concept of deployable antenna reflector at first. The support structure of such reflector mainly composes of central hub, support rib, support torus and tension system. Next we perform three buckling analysis, the buckling of supported rib, the buckling of inflated torus and the local buckling of inflated torus. The critical buckling load and the buckling modes of supported rib under tension is obtained by simulation and then verified by our non-contact tests. The typical buckling modes are characterized as the local buckles induced by the tension. For the inflated torus, the buckling characteristics of torus under radial tension are simulated. The out-of-plane bending and torsion are the major buckling modes of inflated torus under radial tension whose critical load is far smaller than that of in-plane buckling case. The wrinkling load and distribution of an inflated arch are simulated and tested to reveal a degenerate effect of wrinkles on the load-carrying ability of inflated arch. Our results reveal that such deployable reflector are so flexible to be very sensitive to external loading and may be easily buckled. The global buckling results from the local wrinkles which may be considered as the critical case to design the load-carrying ability of such deployable reflector. The results obtained in this paper are good references to the design of inflatable support structure of deployable antenna.