Low-Power Solar Sail Control using In-Plane Forces from Tunable Buckling of Kirigami Films

TL;DR

This study demonstrates that buckled kirigami films can redirect incident light to generate controllable in-plane forces, offering a low-power method for solar sail steering through tunable buckling geometries.

Contribution

The paper introduces a novel approach using buckled kirigami films to generate in-plane forces for solar sails, combining simulations and experiments to validate the concept.

Findings

Buckled kirigami surfaces can reflect light to produce in-plane forces.

Finite element and ray optics simulations agree with experimental results.

Kirigami films offer a scalable, low-power method for solar sail control.

Abstract

We present a proof-of-concept study showing that buckled aluminized polyimide films perforated with millimeter-scale cuts can redirect normally incident light obliquely and generate net in-plane force components parallel to the global solar sail surface. We use finite element simulations to obtain the buckled shapes of different periodic unit cell geometries and apply ray optics modeling to compute the resulting light-pressure forces. The simulations show that the buckled kirigami surfaces reflect light into different directions producing a net in-plane force parallel to the direction of stretching. We verify these trends experimentally by illuminating a tensioned kirigami sample with a laser and observing reflected beam patterns consistent with the ray optics simulations. These results suggest that kirigami films may offer a scalable, low-power, and lightweight way to achieve controllable in-plane forces for solar sail steering.