Simulation and experiment research on flexible belt deployment dynamics of a large hoop truss antenna

Abstract

The flexible belt is a critical component of the large hoop truss antenna, it decides whether the antenna can deploy successfully or not. When the antenna is stowed, it holds down and makes the antenna in a bundle. It releases before the antenna deployment in orbit. The dynamic behaviors of it have very important effect to the reliable deployment of the large deployable antenna, it is necessary and urgent to study its dynamic behaviors detaily. When flexible belt releases, its dynamic behaviors of large displacements, large rotations, and large deformations are shown during the deployment. These behaviors which belong to typically geometrically nonliear behaviors of flexible bodies are very complex, it is very difficult to perform the numerical analysis using commercial softwares, and it becomes a hot spot of the dynamic research. According to the characteristics and function of the flexible belt which is adopted in a large deployable antenna, we establised the numerical analysis model of the flexible belt by the house software that will be presented in the following paragraghs, in the house software, the geometrically exact method is used. During searching of the dynamic behaviors, a lot of factors are concerned, such as composite belts, mechnisms, damper equipments and so on. By the researching, the critical parameters which affect the dynamic characteristics are recognied, some optimized designs are performed, we developed a new flexilble belt. The verfied experiments are performed in different conditions which include the ambient, hot and cold temperatures. The results of the experiments show a good agreements which is compared to the numerical analysis results.