New Solar Array Designs Take Origami to Space

At some point in your life you’ve probably had a go at making an origami swan or frog. You’ve probably not got as far as folding a 25-metre solar array for a spacecraft.

That’s something engineers at Brigham Young University, in Utah, and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory are working on, with a little help from renowned origami maestro Robert Lang. Team leader Larry Howell explained that when dealing with space, one of the biggest problems for engineers is, well, space.

“It’s expensive and difficult to get things into space; you’re very constrained in space,” he said. “With origami you can make it compact for launch and then as you get into space it can deploy and be large.” The solar array the team has developed can be folded to a diameter of 2.7m for launch, then expanded to a full 25m when deployed.

"The spacecraft would be inside a rocket, like an Atlas V rocket, and the solar array would be wrapped around the spacecraft and it would be all folded up compactly and then launched into space and deployed," explained PhD candidate Shannon Zirbel, who worked on the project, in a video about the project. She also demonstrated a "CubeSat" version that could easily be squeezed into the hold of any rocket.

Of course, a solar panel made out of a paper napkin wouldn’t really fly, so there’s a difference between the methods they used and the sort of paper-craft you might have done at after school club. The solar array in question was made out of silicon panels with “compliant mechanisms.” “A compliant mechanism is a device that gets its motion from things like bending and deflection rather than hinges and bearings,” Howell explained. “We can actually make them very low cost sometimes; they can also operate in very harsh environments like the environment in space.”

In order to combine the concept of compliant mechanisms with the silicon solar panels, they went to origami expert Robert Lang, who has been involved in folding everything from telescope lenses to human organs. The ultimate goal is to create an array that can produce 250 kilowatts of energy. To put that in perspective, the International Space Station currently has eight solar arrays that generate only 84 kilowatts in total.

It’s just one example of an ancient art meeting the latest technology to solve a problem in a new and effective way, and the idea of mixing origami and engineering could find other applications. In an essay in the Journal of Mechanical Design in September, Howell explained the opportunity presented by the artistic practice: “Origami-inspired systems have the potential to meet needs that are presently unfulfilled because the design of such systems was previously too difficult or they were not yet envisioned.”

He suggested ideas including body implants that could be inserted through a small incision before expanding outwards, emergency shelters that wcould be small for shipping and easy to erect, and space-saving solutions like foldable mobile phones. Presumably, they'd be a little more sophisticated than a regular flip phone.