Solar panels of satellite are deployed by tape spring hinges (TSHs) which have changeable stiffness. Generally, the stiffness of the TSH is small at folded status so that the panels are driven slightly. However, to lock up panels, the stiffness becomes large sharply at deployed status. Since the solar panel is thin sheet, flexible deformation is generated by driving torques of TSHs. Both the nonlinear stiffness of TSHs and the flexible deformation of panels generate obvious vibration which affects the deployment performance and operational stability of satellite. To obtain expected deployment performances such as the low latch-up load, latching without overshoot and high deployment stiffness, the vibration of solar panels is analyzed by using commercial software RecurDyn in this paper. To express the flexible deformation, the panels are modeled by the model order reduction (MOR) method and the finite element method (FEM), respectively. The driving torque between adjacent panels is described as function of the stiffness factor, damping coefficient, rotation angle, angular velocity and one spline (stiffness-angle profile). After that, two virtual maneuvers including deployment and orbit maneuver are design to figure the differences between FEM and MOR in modeling of vibration of solar panels. Although the MOR is much efficient than FEM, final results show that the vibration accelerations by the MOR is much lower than those by FEM. The MOR is incompetent in modeling of vibration of solar panels of satellites.

Vibration; Solar panels; Tape spring hinges; Nonlinear stiffness; Flexible deformation