Abstract:Thin film plays an important role in the field of aerospace because of its advantages of light weight, small folding volume and good mechanical properties. Thin film is a flexible material with characteristics of small thickness and bending stiffness. The local buckling phenomenon of the thin film is easy to occur at large external loads, leading to undesirable wrinkles. Folding is one of the important factors affecting the structure and properties of spatial thin films. Therefore, it is crucial to study the characteristics of film folding and its inhibition for the application of film structure in the field of aerospace. In this paper, the effects of the structural parameters and boundary conditions on the fold characteristics of thin films are studied. Aiming at square membrane structure under tensile load, wrinkling simulation analysis of the structure is carried out by using the explicit dynamic method, and the simulation results are compared with the theoretical calculation results to verify the simulation model and analysis results. In order to explore the change law of wrinkles characteristics under tensile loads, we analyze how the wrinkles characteristics and deformation of square membrane are affected by the structural parameters including membrane aspect ratio, internal angle, clamping width, and side cable structure. The results show that the out-of-plane deformation of membrane increases and the wrinkle distribution area expands when the aspect ratio of membrane increases from 1.0 to 1.5. The wrinkles are mainly distributed in the corner area with an acute angle between two sides of membrane when the internal angle in the membrane is less than 75°. In addition, the occurrence of wrinkles can be effectively suppressed by increasing the clamping width of membrane and the side cable structure. To further verify the analysis results, fold tests under different clamping widths were carried out. The simulation model is validated by the trend analysis of the experimental results of fold number and amplitude as well as their comparison with the simulation results, which provides a certain theoretical basis for the tensile analysis of thin film structure.