Abstract: Membrane material is widely used to form deployable space structural systems, including solar arrays of various designs. Packaging and deployment analyses are two of the key techniques for the development of space membrane structures. Some new fold patterns were developed for thin membrane structures that are genuinely biomimetic. In the report of this paper, spring-mass systems are used to describe structural behavior of membrane material during the deployment process of a membrane solar array. During the development process, self-contact or collision of the membrane occurs. The rule used to identify the self-contact elements is advanced and a penalty function method is developed to treat this difficult problem. The deployment processes of a two-dimensional membrane folded by three fold patterns are analyzed by this method. Concluded from the results, leaf-out fold pattern and Miura-Ori fold model are fit for folding plane membrane.