A numerical and experimental study of the quasi-static deployment of membrane tubes

The paper is concerned with the deployment of inflatable structures in quasi-static conditions. The problem is formulated as a minimization problem under constraints with emphasis on the self-contact aspect and it is solved by a descent algorithm of the first order which allows to overcome the singularity or ill-conditioning difficulty specific to membrane structures. Numerical computations are carried out on a simply folded membrane tube and compared with experimental results in order to prove the ability of the proposed numerical approach to correctly predict the deployment process.