Design of Band-Style Lock-Unlock Mechanism for Space Arm

A band-style lock-unlock mechanism for space-arms was proposed to assure locking of space-arms reliably. To light down mass of the whole mechanism, a centralized lock-unlock scheme was employed here. Several slider-crank mechanisms were driven by single crankshaft to accomplish the unlocking operation. Spiral spring was used to draw the clamp-band back due to its characteristics of storing much more energy in limited space. To assure normal operation of this lock-unlock mechanism, the kinematics and dynamics analysis of this crank-slider mechanism was presented. As the space arm will experience sever launching condition, the modal analysis of brackets, which are pivotal components in this mechanism, were accomplished with ANSYS. The simulative experimental results obtained on ground reveals that this lock-unlock mechanism can implement the objectives mentioned above.