Study On Optimal Design Of Deployable Antenna With Consideration Of Thermal Deformations

The development of space deployable antenna structures is on the direction oflarge-scale, light-weight and high-precision. The traditional design methods are difficultto be used to fulfill the increasingly strict requirements on the structure’s performances.Numerical optimization methodology provides a powerful tool for design of suchstructures. In this paper, the optimal design problem of a kind of cable net antennastructure was investigated in detail with consideration of environmental thermal loads.The main works include:1) The shortcomings of inverse iteration technique and the pretension optimizationmethod based on nonlinear finite element were analyzed. A new pretension optimizationmethod was proposed on the basis of pretension compensation method and the smallelastic modulus technique. This method allows various constraints on the designedpretension values, thus reduces the complexity of construction.2) The characteristics of the space thermal environment were analyzed. For atypical cable net antenna, the thermal-induced deformations of the structure on differentorbit positions were analyzed by using the finite element method. The worse-case loadsituations were determined.3) According to the requirements for the performances of satellite antennastructures, a two-sate multi-load-case optimization model was proposed. As an example,a cable net deployable antenna structure was designed and the optimal design schemewas obtained.