Ultra-Flexible Advanced Stiffness Truss for Large Solar Arrays

LGarde will develop a lightweight Ultra-Flexible Advanced Stiffness Truss (Ultra-FAST) that will prove to have greater material metrics and structural performance indices than the current state of the art for large space deployable trusses. The key to the success of the proposed technology has to do with the new design approach and new material development. First, customized components will be fabricated such as thin-walled longerons and short flexure hinges in Phase I. The proposed flexure hinges have higher effective compressive strain values in bending than traditional compressive materials. These two key components have low density values not greater than 1,800 kg/m3 and are made of high performance carbon fibers. The estimated total truss mass per length is approximately 0.167 kg/m. L/d=100 slenderness longerons made of thin-walled tubes will guarantee a high axial and bending stiffness truss because they have a higher area moment of inertia compared with traditional solid rods. An axial load will be applied in order to measure the axial stiffness and axial strength of the truss. Also, bending moment will be applied to measure the bending stiffness and bending strength.

Space exploration, solar sail and solar electric propulsion are one of the most important goals for NASA. L.Garde Ultra-FAST boom will enhance the capability of NASA to accomplish these goals and many other missions related with large support structures. Typical applications for the proposed truss are to deploy and support solar-cell arrays, magnetometers, hydrophones, spectrometers, antennas, interferometers or gravity-gradient masses. Their lightweight, high performance and compact stowage volume provide the portability needed for those applications. Also, it is potentially a very useful component for remote manipulator system in space, or undersea.

The proposed innovative technology represents a major improvement in deployable trusses for support structures used in military, terrestrial and space applications. For many military and commercial space missions, this innovation will minimize launch mass, volume and costs, while maintaining the required structural performance in the space environment. In addition, this technology will provide a reduction in installation and labor cost, not only for space systems, but for terrestrial deployable solar arrays that need to be portable. In addition, the Ultra-FAST boom is ideal for structural light-weighting applications such as lightweight deployable hierarchical structures, both for space and terrestrial environments.

This is early/mid-stage (TRL 4) — the most realistic path in is NASA SBIR/STTR, which funds small businesses and research institutions to develop technology aligned with NASA's needs (equity-free, phased funding). Check whether a current SBIR/STTR solicitation topic overlaps with this project's technology area, or contact the project directly (above) to ask.

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