Design and analysis of bidirectional deployable parabolic cylindrical antenna

Abstract

A bidirectional deployable parabolic cylindrical reflector for an L-band synthetic aperture radar is presented in this study, in which a self-deployed antenna with low weight was designed. The antenna consists of four curved surfaces formed from thin sheets of composite materials connected by hinges along the edges, and the reflective surface is provided by the front surface. The edge profiles of connecting lines were obtained through geometric analysis. A scaled model, including design and manufacture, was demonstrated to validate the process from the folded state to the fully deployed state. The non-contact synchronous vision measuring method was used to test the basic frequency of the scaled model, and the test results gave the verification of the analyses. Compared with the existing unidirectional deployable antenna, this new type of bidirectional deployable antenna can be applied to larger-size antennas and has better performance because the glass-woven tape connections were substituted with more reliable hinges. Static, modal, harmonic response, and transient response analyses of the full-sized reflector structure were modeled with the commercial finite element (FE) package ABAQUS. The modeling techniques were developed to predict the structural dynamic behavior of the reflector and the results showed that the first natural frequency was 0.865 Hz, and the reflector structure had good stiffness in three directions. This proposed structure has very high stiffness-to-mass ratio because of its hollow solid construction. A preliminary simulation of radiation properties of the parabolic cylindrical antenna, fed by an off-set linear feed horn array, was conducted to obtain the radiation pattern of the feed and the reflector.