Structural
instabilities
In-space manufacturing and assembly
Active structures
Check out our SpaceFlight Mechanics Episode
Prof. Royer talks about the present and future of space structures, including deployables, in-space manufacturing and assembly, and the role structural mechanics research can play in creating game-changing spacecraft concepts!
News
Azadeh and Siamand participated in SMDS!
Azadeh and Siamand designed the TREX spacecraft to rendezvous with a temporarily captured asteroid in the Earth-Moon system, as part of the Cornell SmallSat Mission Design School! Stay tuned for more details about the spacecraft, and the whole mission called Mini-Luna! Find more about the Cornell Smallsat Mission Design School here.
The lab was awarded research funding from NYCST!
The lab received the award for its In-Space Shaping of Deployable Space Structures project. We will develop and in-space assembly and manufacturing (ISAM) solution amenable to the responsive creation of large space structures. We will design a deployable building block whose shape can be programmed through buckling during deployment, drastically reducing processing energy and thus build times.
New paper on structural instabilities experiments!
Our work on "Experimentally probing the stability of thin-shell structures under pure bending" just got published in a special edition of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A! We developed a unique imperfection insensitive testing apparatus which allows to unveil complex shell stability features which were hitherto inaccessible experimentally. More details