Method of Packaging and Deployment of Large Membranes in Space

The purpose of this paper is to present a new concept of packaging and deployment of large membranes in space. The problem of biaxially folding of a plane is transferred to the elastic problem of a biaxially compressed infinite plate. After solving the problem, the plate thickness is reduced infinitesimally small, and thus the result represents the isometric transfer of an infinite plane subject to biaxial shortening. As a result, the concave polyhedral surface is discovered, which is composed of a repetition of a fundamental region, which is further composed of four congruent parallelograms. It is shown that the packaging and deployment by this surface geometry satisfies various requirements as to operations in space.