This paper presents a novel design of micro solar sails for emerging lightweight chip scale spacecraft based on flexible electronic circuits. To acquire large deformation, the micro solar sails were designed to be bilayer beams that were able to be electro-thermally actuated by Joule heating. The concept design of the solar sail with high area-to-mass ratios allowed the solar sailing system, named as ChipSail, for efficient orbital transfer and attitude adjustment. The principle of solar sailing with ChipSail was illustrated, and the thickness of the two metals for the bilayer sails should be no more than 1 µm, so as to achieve the efficient solar sailing. Then, the fabrication and characterization of such bilayer microstructures for solar sails were introduced briefly. After that, the electro-thermal analysis of such solar sails deployed on the low earth orbit was carried out, and it was found that the balanced temperature of the sails under the effect of solar radiation and thermal reemission of the sails was 315.31 K, followed by electro-thermal modelling of the sails under the Joule heating. A nonlinear second order differential equation was derived, which allowed rapid prediction of the thermal distribution across the sail. Equivalence of the bilayer solar sail to a width-changing 980 µm long bilayer beam was proposed and validated by finite element analysis. Finally, the thermo-mechanical model on the bilayer sail was then established and solved numerically. Results showed that the maximum bending angle could reach to 94.05º by applying a voltage of 0.05 V across the sail. The electro-thermo-mechanical model laid a solid foundation for dynamic control of the configuration of the ChipSail for efficient orbital transfer and attitude adjustment in space.

本文提出了一种新的微型太阳能帆设计，用于基于柔性电子电路的新兴轻量级芯片级航天器。为了获得较大的变形，将微型太阳帆设计为双层梁，可以通过焦耳加热对其进行电热驱动。具有高面积质量比的太阳帆的概念设计使名为ChipSail的太阳帆系统能够有效地进行轨道转移和姿态调整。说明了使用ChipSail进行太阳能航行的原理，双层帆的两种金属的厚度应不超过1 µm，以实现高效的太阳能航行。然后，简要介绍了这种用于太阳帆的双层微结构的制造和表征。之后，对部署在低地球轨道上的此类太阳帆进行了电热分析，结果发现，在太阳辐射和帆热释放的作用下，帆的平衡温度为315.31 K，然后进行电焦耳加热下帆的热模型。推导了一个非线性的二阶微分方程，可以快速预测整个帆的热分布。提出了双层太阳帆与宽度可变的980 µm双层光束的等效性，并通过有限元分析对其进行了验证。最后，建立了双层帆的热力学模型，并进行了数值求解。结果表明，通过在帆上施加0.05 V的电压，最大弯曲角度可达到94.05º。