Extreme orbital thermal cycling and temperature-dependent clearance nonlinearity make it difficult to predict contact–impact, stick–slip, and bifurcation responses of flexible deployable space structures with sufficient stability, accuracy, and computational efficiency. An Adaptive Dissipation–Precision Coordinated Multi-Scale Implicit Integration Algorithm (ADPC-MSIIA) is proposed. First, an absolute nodal coordinate formulation (ANCF)-based thermo-mechanical clearance-joint model with thermal-viscosity-modified contact and frictional/impact heat feedback is established; second, a dual-time-scale implicit integration scheme with dual-α stability–dissipation control and third-order compensation is developed; finally, numerical validation is performed using a linear single-degree-of-freedom (SDOF) benchmark, a temperature-dependent clearance impact oscillator, finite-element and published benchmark comparisons, and a deployable annular truss antenna case. Simulation results show that ADPC-MSIIA achieves a high-frequency spectral radius of 0.867, an effective convergence order of 2.98, a maximum contact force error of 3.1%, and a 51.7% reduction in the global cumulative error compared with the generalized-α method. This study contributes to knowledge by linking temperature-driven clearance evolution, frictional heat feedback, and adaptive numerical dissipation within a unified framework for predicting non-smooth thermo-mechanical deployment dynamics of large flexible space structures with clearance joints.
Hua et al. (Sun,) studied this question.