Abstract
Solar sails are spacecrafts that use light propulsion to push their large sails to accelerate forward. Just like how sailboats use the wind to move across the ocean, solar sails use the pressure from light particles emitted from the Sun to push them forward. In space, absent of friction, this tiny pressure provides a constant acceleration to the sails and ultimately gain large values of velocity. Solar sails rely heavily on their massively thin sails to remain flat. Unfortunately, these sails are prone to deformations due to external forces encountered in space. If deformations occur, the sail will not receive the maximum amount of solar pressure. Changes in the shape of the sail can also cause the spacecraft to change trajectories. This paper will show the deformation of the sail due to celestial bodies. Solidworks will be used to model and analyze these forces using the finite element method. An analytic approach will be used to find the vibration mode shapes and frequencies for the sail. The vibration mode shapes and frequencies will then be compared with the values obtained from Solidworks to validate the use of the finite vi element method. Once verified, several loads such as solar pressure and gravitational forces from celestial bodies will be applied to the sail. Another test will be conducted to see the amount of deformation caused by changes in sail size. This thesis is focused completely on the analysis of the sails therefore, a simple quad-triangular solar sail configuration is used. The results show that gravitational forces caused by celestial bodies causes deformation to the sails depending on the orientation of the spacecraft. Increasing the sail size causes the deformations to grow exponentially.