Deflective Sunshades: conceptual design and origami-inspired folding strategy

Engineering notes

Engineering notes will be added by the Power for Solar editorial team.

Chinese explanation / 中文解读

中文解读待补充：本站会优先为光伏效率、钙钛矿太阳能电池、储能技术、太阳能热利用、BIPV、并网技术等高价值论文补充中文说明。

Original abstract

Space-based solar radiation management has been proposed as a direct means of modulating Earth's radiative balance by reducing incident solar flux. A prominent concept consists of large sunshades operating near the Sun-Earth L1 region. However, feasibility is constrained by a fundamental lower bound on the required mass, arising from the coupled requirements of achieving sufficient insolation reduction while maintaining dynamical equilibrium under solar radiation pressure (SRP). We introduce a class of sunshades, termed deflective, designed to shape the effective SRP through macroscopic surface geometry. By employing inclined reflective elements, these systems redirect incident radiation to simultaneously control flux attenuation and the resulting momentum exchange, enabling the use of conventional high-reflectivity materials (e.g., aluminium films). The concept admits multiple geometrical realizations, including conical, pyramidal, and louvered (venetian-blind) configurations. A conical configuration is then studied in more detail as a representative implementation of this broader design principle. To improve its packaging efficiency and scalability, we consider a distributed constellation of units and propose a flat-folding strategy based on a Miura-Ori pattern adapted to the conical geometry finding its optimal configuration parameters resulting in a favourable geometry.

Links and sources

• Official / arXiv page
• PDF from original source

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