What is it about?
Flexible deployment analysis and optimization of a novel deployable structure for deploying and supporting a 28 m long satellite synthetic aperture radar antenna are carried out in this study. Three stages are conducted in the deploying process: (1) acceleration, (2) uniform velocity, and (3) deceleration phases. The deployment experiments of the ground prototype show that the deployment angles among the antenna panels in the acceleration and deceleration phases are desynchronized. Flexible deployment dynamics is analyzed, and three indexes are identified to describe the deployment including deployment synchronism, steady driving torque, and maximum strain energy. An approach to optimize the auxiliary spring is presented to solve the desynchronized deployment problem. The response surface method is employed to model the optimization objective. The optimization and experimental results prove the feasibility of the proposed deployment analysis and optimization theory.
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Why is it important?
The proposed research can be applied to other large-scale satellite synthetic aperture radar antennas.
Perspectives
This paper has presented a novel modular deployable truss structure (MDTS) for a large synthetic aperture radar (SAR) antenna. The deployment behavior of this MDTS was studied through both analytical models and scale model deployment experiments. Compared with legacy systems, the presented MDTS can be used to deploy and support a 28-m-long SAR antenna only within an approximately 2.5 × 4 × 0.6 m stowed volume at launch.
Dr hui Yang
Anhui University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Deployment analysis and optimization of a flexible deployable structure for large synthetic aperture radar antennas, Proceedings of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers Part G Journal of Aerospace Engineering, July 2015, SAGE Publications,
DOI: 10.1177/0954410015594638.
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