Thermal modeling and design of the anisogrid morphing structure for a modular optical telescope concept

Abstract

To meet the requirements for the next generation of optical space telescopes, a paradigm shift is required from current structures that are static, heavy, and stiff toward innovative structures that are adaptive, lightweight, versatile, and intelligent. A morphing or adaptive structure, the thermally actuated anisogrid morphing boom, can be used to meet the design requirements by making the primary structure actively adapt to the on-orbit environment. The adaptive anisogrid structure is actuated through the intelligent application of thermal gradients. This active primary structure improves structural and thermal stability performance, reduces mass, and enables mission architectures. This effort expands on the author’s previous work by incorporating the impact of thermal coupling and demonstrating an updated architecture. This paper introduces a thermally isolated version of the thermal morphing anisogrid structure to enable control of the thermal losses between active members. To evaluate the isolation design, the stiffness and thermal conductivity of these isolating interfaces is addressed. This paper determines that the applied morphing error remains below 5% across all stiffnesses if the joint thermal conductivity is below 0.2 W/(mK). This paper investigates the performance of the thermal morphing system under a variety of structural and thermal isolation interface properties and determines the linear operational regime.