Expanding Origami Solar Panel Structure

From digestible origami pills that could provide alternatives to invasive surgery to solar panels that could be tightly packed in an aircraft and deploy after launch at the heart of origami s.

Expanding origami solar panel structure.

Origami inspired engineering is rapidly finding applications in technology moving beyond space based solar panels and self assembled manufacturing components to commercial products including. Space is a great place for a solar panel because you don t have to worry about nighttime and there are no clouds and no weather he said. The horus uses an expanding ring structure to unfold a solar membrane. The exterior of the habitat will be covered in solar cells to maximize the energy generation.

One technique that has been used for an origami inspired solar array is called a miura fold. Origami the art of paper folding thus naturally provides inspirations for deployable structures. Solar power origami style nasa. We ll utilize the high albedo and reflectiveness of the snow.

It is low cost and the materials can handle harsh solar environments. To date all kinematic modeling of rigid origami treats the paper as having zero thickness. A deployable structure is a structure that can reconfigure and change shape size mainly from folding and unfolding and has many applications from daily essentials e g umbrella vascular stents to solar panels for spacecraft. Applying origami principles on rigid silicon solar panels a material considerably thicker than the paper used for the traditional japanese art the byu conceived solar array would unfold to.

This well known origami fold was invented by japanese astrophysicist koryo miura. Their 1 20th scale tabletop prototype expands to a deployed diameter of 4 1 feet 1 25 meters. Because the habitat will have to be transported with a hercules plane and potentially later by a rocket there is very strict volume requirements. Brian trease at nasa s jet propulsion laboratory has been thinking about how it could be used in spacecraft.

Unfold it and you ve got a structure 82 feet 25 meters across. Origami has been a hot topic in technology recently.