Thermo-Elastic Analysis of a Spaceborne Spiral Dish Antenna
Abstract
At the Technical University of Delft (TU Delft), a Kirigami inspired method of spirally deploying a coiled up band into a parabolic reflector is being studied for its use in space. This reflector would allow for the deployment of large solid parabolic reflector into space, as long as it is able to maintain its shape with regards to its deployment and the impact sustained by the environment. This thesis performs a thermo-elastic analysis on the spiral dish Antenna (SDA) using a combination of ESATAN-TMS, Abaqus, and python scripting. After analyzing a reflector for different low earth orbital cases in ESATAN, the heat fluxes are transferred to Abaqus to perform a second thermal analysis. A base SDA is modelled with an Aluminum zipper and Carbon-fiber-reinforced polymers (CFRP) band. The SDA is shown to experience temperatures ranging from 175K to 375K with temperature changes of 100K in less than 100s. The reflector can experiences maximum temperature deltas of 93K across the reflector at a single moment during orbit. These temperature changes cause the SDA to have a maximum displacement of 20mm with a maximum root mean square (RMS) of 6mm. This thesis also shows the creation of a cross pattern on the SDA most likely created by the coefficient of thermal expansion (CTE) mismatch between the zipper and band material. An improved SDA is modelled after an initial parametrization, showing an improvement to the displacement field with the max RMS being around 1mm. This thesis shows that the base design studied by the researcher would not be able to perform in the thermal environment of space. The researcher has shown that proper design consideration of the CTE match between the band and the spiral interface, the SDA can perform similarly to a normal reflector with the same design parameters. |
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Thesis Material
The thesis can be found at the TU Delft thesis repository:
Due to the use of Python for the scripting of a large part of the simulations and for the analysis of the results, a copy of the code used can be found at my GitHub: github.com/Nathan-vdw/SDA-Analysis
The thesis can be found at the TU Delft thesis repository:
Due to the use of Python for the scripting of a large part of the simulations and for the analysis of the results, a copy of the code used can be found at my GitHub: github.com/Nathan-vdw/SDA-Analysis