Reduced model validation of thermal-formed thin film polyimide panels

The success of the Hubble Space Telescope and other observatories has created a demand in the United States for ever larger and more powerful space telescopes. Ultra-lightweight and/or inflatable gossamer space structures have the potential to significantly enhance the performance of space telescopes and other satellites, but significant nonlinear responses present barriers to implementation that have yet to be overcome. Stiff thermal-formed thin film polyimide panels are investigated here as a means of addressing some of the prohibitive challenges of more traditional gossamer structures. Fully accurate models of the tessellating honeycomb panel geometry were prohibitively large and incapable of satisfactorily approximating experimental data. A form of hybrid modeling was therefore applied in which test data were used to define model parameters, enabling significant reduction in complexity (order) over the original model. The reduced hybrid models performed well computationally, and very closely matched the experimental data.