A vibration analysis of a deployable structure

Deployable structures capable of being packaged into a small volume to be deployed on orbit to full size have been widely utilized on aerospace vehicles. Owing to clearances, a nonlinear dynamic feature emerges. In order to more accurately obtain the vibration properties of the solar arrays with clearances. In this paper, vibrations of the structure are stimulated by means of hammer impact method. After that, the Constant-Q transform based on non-stationary Gabor frame and Fourier transform are employed to analyze the corresponding vibration properties. As the experimental results shown, (1) The damping will become greater along with the vibration frequencies increasing; (2) The inner panel and the outer panel have different dynamical structures, and the vibration of the outer panel tend to be more random; (3) Damping for high frequencies tend to be greater as model is deployed, for high frequencies vibration have shorter vibration time in the corresponding experiment; (4) In contrast to deployed state, vibration energy in folded situation is in more dispersed distribution. The analysis may be valuable for the analysis of the nonlinear dynamics of the deployable structure.