Abstract
The assembly accuracy of the extendible support structure is of importance for the imaging capability of synthetic aperture radar antennas. In general, due to manufacturing imperfections and installation variations, its assembly accuracy will be inevitably degraded. Therefore, controlling the assembly deviation is highly concerned in practice. To meet the accuracy requirement and make “the control” more efficient, this study proposes a novel method to quantitatively conduct dimensional adjustment of links for extendible support structures of synthetic aperture radar antennas. Since the extendible support structure is generally over-constrained in the deployed configuration, the relationship between the assembly deviation and the variation sources is first derived by means of equivalent transformation. Based on the mathematical expression of assembly deviation, an inequality constrained sparse optimization model for quantitatively resizing links is formulated. Then, an efficient algorithm integrating the alternating direction method of multipliers and binary search is developed to solve the above optimization model, thereby acquiring the optimal combination of link adjustment. Finally, numerical case studies are carried out to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in Matlab, which show that it can not only achieve satisfactory performance in prediction but also significantly improve the assembly efficiency.
Highlights
With the development of imaging technology, synthetic aperture radar (SAR) antennas have been widely applied in remote sensing [1], [2]
This paper develops an assembly deviation model and sparse optimization algorithm to obtain the strategy of link adjustment for the extendible support structure (ESS), which are validated by the aforementioned numerical studies
For the reason that the proposed binary search algorithm is capable of providing a suitable λ such that ||x||0 = n, we can choose the better adjustment strategy according to the optimization results of assembly deviations
Summary
With the development of imaging technology, synthetic aperture radar (SAR) antennas have been widely applied in remote sensing [1], [2]. Providing that all the electrical devices function well, the surface accuracy of antennas, to a great extent, determines the work performance of radar [3]. Due to the space limitation of rockets, SAR antennas are folded during the launch and deployed after entering the predetermined orbit. The extendible support structure (ESS) is designed to support the deployable SAR antennas with a stable and precise configuration [4]. Because of inevitable manufacturing imperfections and installation variations, the ESS often fails to meet the specified accuracy requirement [5]. The associate editor coordinating the review of this manuscript and approving it for publication was Hamid Mohammad-Sedighi
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