Deployable Composite Thin-Walled Structures (DCTWS) are widely used in space applications due to their ability to compactly fold and self-deploy in orbit, enabled by cutouts. Cutout design is crucial for balancing structural rigidity and flexibility, ensuring material integrity during large deformations, and providing adequate load-bearing capacity and stability once deployed. Most research has focused on optimizing cutout size and shape, while topology optimization offers a broader design space. However, the anisotropic properties of woven composite laminates, complex failure criteria, and multi-performance optimization needs have limited the exploration of topology optimization in this field. This work derives the sensitivities of bending stiffness, critical buckling load, and the failure index of woven composite materials with respect to element density, and formulates both single-objective and multi-objective topology optimization models using a linear weighted aggregation approach. The developed method was integrated with the commercial finite element software ABAQUS via a Python script, allowing efficient application to cutout design in various DCTWS configurations to maximize bending stiffness and critical buckling load under material failure constraints. Optimization of a classical tubular hinge resulted in improvements of 107.7% in bending stiffness and 420.5% in critical buckling load compared to level-set topology optimization results reported in the literature, validating the effectiveness of the approach. To facilitate future research and encourage the broader adoption of topology optimization techniques in DCTWS design, the source code for this work is made publicly available via a GitHub link: https://github.com/jinhao-ok1/Topo-for-DCTWS.git.

Composite Thin-walled Lenticular Tube (CTLT) is increasingly utilized in small satellites missions as a lightweight, foldable, and rollable structural material that facilitates the construction of large deployable systems. The CTLT is initially flattened and coiled around a central hub for storage before launch, during which elastic energy is stored as deformation energy, allowing it to be self-deployed on demand for use in orbit. This work presents a comprehensive investigation into the coiling, storage and deployment behaviors of CTLT that wraps around a central hub. A nonlinear explicit dynamic finite element model was developed with both deformable CTLT and rigid-bodies mechanisms including the central hub and guide rollers, as well as the complex interactions among them. The coiling mechanics characteristics such as stored strain energy and rotational moment were presented and validated against experimental data in the literature. Then, the dynamic deployment behaviors were analyzed in terms of two different deployment methods, namely, controlled deployment and free deployment. The effect of material property change during storage was also discussed through numerical experiments.