This paper presents a general method that is based on spring-mass system (SMS) for deployment analysis of inflatable membrane structures. Firstly, the inflatable deployment of the coil-folded tube was simulated by SMS method. The inflatable deployment experiment on an air track was conducted, and the results agreed well with those of the numerical method. Secondly, the influence of inflation rate on deployment dynamics characters was discussed and the results demonstrated that variations of inflation rate had a great influence on the deployment process. Finally, the deployment processes of tor...
