Mesh Generation of Elliptical Aperture Reflectors

Abstract

Offset-feed elliptical aperture reflectors have better mechanical and electrical performance than circular aperture reflectors and are an inevitable trend for the future development of high-precision space-borne antennas. The surface mesh geometry is crucially important to ensure surface accuracy and effective aperture of mesh reflectors. This paper proposes a quadratic-curve method for mesh generation of elliptical aperture reflectors that can achieve an attractive pretension uniformity and large effective aperture. From the mechanical behavior point of view, the generated cable net is beneficial to the truss. First, the steps to generate the quadratic-curve cable net for elliptical aperture reflectors are proposed. Then, the nodal coordinates of cable net are optimized using a dynamic adjustment method of nodes. The numerical examples demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.