AAS 02-180 AAS/AIAA Space Flight Mechanics Meeting, San Antonio, Texas, January 2002 Equilibria and Stiffness of Planar Tensegrity Structures

Tensegrity is a light weight deployable structure that is composed of compressive and tensile members. However, the compressive members, which are made of common metallic structural materials, are not mass-efficient. In this paper, we replace the compressive member with “self-similar” tensegrity structure that has same strength but less mass. We start with a non-tensegrity structure called C4T 1i and show that it can be designed to have the same strength but less weight compared with the compressive member to be replaced. The stiffness-to-mass ratio of the C4T 1i structure, however, is compromised. We then modify the C4T 1i structure to a tensegrity structure called C4T 2i by adding another set of string(s) with pre-stress. It can be shown that C4T 2i is a better substitute of the compressive members in a structure because of less mass and same strength but higher stiffness-to-mass ratio.