View Video Presentation: https://doi.org/10.2514/6.2023-0581.vid

This paper presents the fabrication and testing of a novel hinge design using high strain composite (HSC) flexures. Rather than more conventional curved shells such as tape springs, we use flat HSC sheets for the hinge. Although these flat flexures sacrifice stiffness, they offer the significant benefit of reducing the design size to the centimeter scale. We investigated fabrication techniques using unidirectional and plain-weave plies that result in minimum thickness for a required natural frequency when deployed. We observed that applying external pressure during the curing reduces surface defects of the HSC sheet. Next, we built several prototypes consisting of two panels and a hinge. We explored different fabrication techniques of co-curing the HSC sheets together and separately with panel bonding. All the prototypes survived folding tests and were able to deploy for at least several cycles. We observed cracks in one of the prototypes that we attribute to the misalignment of one of the panels, which in turn modifies the boundary conditions for the flexure. We experimentally characterized the natural frequency of the deployed panels using impact hammer tests. Our analytic predictions, which use calculated laminate stiffness, are within 3% accuracy for unidirectional plies. The plain weave laminates show significant deviation from the predictions, and we hope to experimentally estimate the stiffness to improve the estimation. We analyzed the deployment dynamics of the hinge and observed maximum accelerations in the order of 10g for the panel.