Presenter: Nathan Coleman
Authors: Nathan Coleman
Faculty Advisor: Spencer Magleby
Institution: Brigham Young University
When designing antennas for satellites, paraboloidal shapes are ideal due to their high directivity; however, paraboloidal shapes are volumetrically inefficient to transport to space. By using principles of folding found in origami, an antenna’s efficiency of deployable surface area from stowed volume can be increased. Doubly curved surfaces, such as paraboloids, present unique challenges to rigid foldable patterns as they are mathematically impossible to create from a flat sheet. Previous works have addressed this issue by using flexible membranes that attach to a rigid frame to approximate parabolic shapes. One of the drawbacks to this approach is that support frames are volumetrically inefficient and usually require high part counts. The objective of this work was to create a foldable paraboloidal antenna from rigid panels to retain the directivity of the antenna while minimizing the stowed volume and total part count. A paraboloidal flasher origami pattern was modified with a combination of tapered panels and strained joints to retain the kinematics of paper origami models, while accommodating for the thickness of real-world materials; however, directly tapering all panels in the selected flasher pattern would result in 268 unique bevel angles. To minimize the complexity of producing these bevels and enable planar manufacturing of the antenna, the tapers were discretized into 2 distinct layers, which were then adhered in different sections of the panels to approximate the overall tapering effect. The selected origami pattern is also non-rigid-foldable and thus requires a snap-through motion to reach its final state. Planar manufacturing allowed the incorporation of integral strained joints, which minimized the final part count, accommodated for stretching during snap-through, and restrained the degrees of freedom at each joint. Using this approach allowed us to create a foldable paraboloidal antenna with only 5 unique parts, each of which can be easily manufactured.