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.