Thermal-structural analysis of a square solar sail

The effect of thermal loads acting on the solar sail surface are investigated, as a refinement of an efficient methodology, recently developed to study the structural response of square solar sails in free flight, under the action of the solar radiation pressure. In particular, a square solar sail with a side length of 20 m at 1 au distance from the Sun is analyzed for different values of the incidence and clock angles. The thermal-structural analyses are performed under the assumption that the stress-displacement solution depends on the temperature field, but there is no inverse dependency. The effect of the thermal loads, for some attitude conditions, resulted strongly detrimental.