Design and Characterization of a Spring Steel Hinge for Deployable CubeSat Structures
A novel implementation of a spring steel was used to design an economical, self locking, self guiding, and self actuating single component hinge. The concept behind the hinge is an off planar arrangement of commercial off the shelf (COTS) spring steel strips. The off plane arrangement of the spring steel strips creates asymmetric folding and buckling to provide the necessary stiffness and dampening for solar panel deployment. This paper presents four spring steel hinge configurations and the analytic equations used to characterize them from three solar panel mass deployments in microgravity. It also discusses the forces generated by the hinge and energy dissipation rate for representative model systems.