Distributed driving deployment method and numerical analysis of large hoop truss antenna

Abstract

As the typical structure of the large satellite antenna, the hoop-truss deployable antenna with large aperture is in urgent need in the new generation of large communication satellite, the relay satellite and the earth observation satellite. At the same time, the requirement of the antenna aperture size tends to become bigger and bigger. However, with the increase of antenna aperture, the driving force required for deployment of antenna is also increasing rapidly, which leads to the reliability problem in the traditional centralized drive mode with the motor and driving cable. The dynamics simulation model of the large Hoop-Truss deployable antenna was established in this paper firstly, and the dynamics simulation of the deployment of the antenna with the motor and driving cable was carried out, respectively. This paper reveals the problem of the asynchronous synchronization of deployment caused by the friction loss of the motor driving force in the load path. The energy consumption during the process of antenna deployment is analyzed, and the growth trend of motor driving force as the antenna aperture increases. The shortcomings of centralized-driving mode with the motor and driving cable are summarized, which mainly caused by the decreasing of driving cable force due to friction. On the basis, a method of distributed drive deployment based on negative stiffness driving device is presented. The design of negative stiffness driving device is given in the paper. The multi-stage non-circular gear device based is used to realize the negative stiffness joints and the design method of key transmission ratio of multi-stage non-circular gear device is also given in the paper. Finally, numerical example of 25 m antenna is demonstrated to verify the effectiveness of the proposed distributed driving method.