Origami-Inspired Solar Array Prototype to Power Space Stations
Working with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and world-renowned origami expert Robert Lang, a team of Brigham Young University (BYU) mechanical engineering students and faculty have designed a solar array that can be tightly compacted for launch and then deployed in space to generate power for space stations or satellites. Applying origami principles on rigid silicon solar panels – a material much thicker than the paper used for the traditional Japanese art – the BYU-conceived solar array can be folded tightly down to a diameter of 2.7 meters and unfolded to its full size of 25 meters across. The goal is to create an array that can produce 250 kilowatts of power. Currently, the International Space Station has eight solar arrays that generate 84 kilowatts of energy.
Transcript
00:00:08 Most people when they think of origami, think, you know, my eight-year-old is doing origami. Why are these engineers at BYU working with origami? BYU's connection with origami began with the realization that origami was really a complaint mechanism. So a complaint mechanism is a device that gets its motion from things like bending and deflection, instead of hinges and bearings. We can actually make them very low cost sometimes. They can also operate in very harsh environments like the environment of space. Origami helps inspire new ways of looking at
00:00:42 how mechanisms can work or how we can approach solutions to problems. It's very expensive and very difficult to get things into space, and the nice thing with a lot of origami is you can make it very compact for launch, and as you get into space you can deploy and be very large. I'm working on an origami inspired deployable solar array for spacecraft. The panel hanging behind me is the 20th scale prototype of this 25-meter array system. By using origami principles, we can get a much larger array into space by stowing it compactly during launch and then opening up once we're in space.
00:01:22 The spacecraft would be inside a rocket, like an Atlas 5 rocket, and the solar array would wrap around the outside of the space craft, and it would be all folded up compactly and then launched into space and deployed. This is our cubesat version. As we open it, it opens to about 50 centimeters and has the potential to generate about 65 watts of energy at this actual size. Cubesats are kind of the new novel way of getting things into space quickly because the're small, they don't cost a lot, and you can throw them on with any rocket that's going into space. In addition to working with people like the National Science Foundation, we have projects with
00:02:05 NASA Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama and also with the JPAL. These are the same people that do the Mars rover and other things. We are doing origami inspired mechanisms, as an expanding solar array. We're involved as a collaborator with Robert Lang, who is a world-renowned expert in origami. It's very unique to work with someone who is such an expert. He's defined an area for himself in this mathematics and origami crossover field. And so this combination of taking this art this ancient art and combining it with engineering, we've been able to discover new things and new motions
00:02:45 that wouldn't otherwise be possible. I think the biggest thing to learn from this kind of research is that you can find inspiration for designs from anything. If you're open to inspiration from any of these sources, then your creativity is not limited.