Structure Design And Thermal Protection Analysis Of Inflatable And Deployable Lunar Habitats

Lunar exploration is the starting point of deep space exploration activity, and constructing lunar habitats is the first and the most important step to explore, exploit and colonize the outer space. Compared with various classes of lunar base construction, inflatable and deployable lunar habitats have great application prospect with the advantages of high folding rate and high volume/weight ratio. It is valuable and meaningful to study scheme designing, theoretical analysis and numerical simulation of inflatable and deployable lunar habitat.This paper, a kind of lunar habitat construction is designed. The habitat is made up of space deployable beam, with functionally carrying loads, and flexible thermal protection film with functionally carrying loads and thermal protection. It can expand along the circumferential direction and longitudinal direction. For this design, structural analysis and thermal analysis are carried out by using ANSYS software. First,9kinds of topological lunar habitat construction are presented and their strength and stiffness are analyzed. The best one is selected with further analysis. Secondly, one-dimensional steady-state thermal analysis for7kinds of thermal protection film is performed and one kind of film with good thermal protective performance is selected as inflatable and deployable lunar habitat film. Finally, thermal analysis of an inflatable and deployable lunar habitat under3different work conditions is conducted, showing that the lunar habitat construction has good thermal protective performance. These results are useful for structure design and thermal protection analysis of inflatable and deployable lunar habitats.