A Design Approach for AstroMesh-Type Contoured-Beam Reflector Antennas

Optimal Topology Configuration Design of Contoured-Beam Mesh Reflectors

“…e typical example in [11] is investigated to compare the results of different methods and demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. e geometric specifications of the mesh reflector are as follows: aperture diameter D � 2.5 m, focal length F � 2.5 m, and distance of the aperture center from the paraboloid axis H � 1.55 m. e parameters of the cosine-Q feed are adopted as q E � q H � 11.25. e operating frequency band is [2.55, 3.45] GHz, and the central frequency point of the band is 3 GHz.…”

“…If the topology configuration and nodal coordinates of a mesh reflector are given, the far-field pattern can be figured out by the Physical Optics method [11].…”

“…For a mesh reflector with a given topology configuration, the reflector nodal coordinates can be optimized to obtain a shaped mesh reflector according to [11]. In this work, the nodal deviations between the designed mesh reflector and the initial ideal one in x-, y-, and z-directions are simultaneously selected as design variables, which theoretically expands the design space compared with the method in [11] and is beneficial to reduce the structural complexity of the obtained mesh-shaped reflectors. Consequently, a multifrequency optimization model is established.…”

“…e detailed data about the node numbers, cable element numbers, and triangle element numbers of the initial mesh reflector in Figure 4, the mesh-shaped reflector in [11], and the obtained mesh-shaped reflector in this work are listed in Table 3. Compared with the mesh-shaped reflector in [11], the numbers of nodes, cable elements, and triangle elements of the obtained one are reduced by 19.4%, 22.4%, and 21.7%, respectively. erefore, for the obtained mesh-shaped reflector, not only the electromagnetic performance requirements are satisfied but also the structural complexity of the mesh reflector is greatly improved.…”

“…Unfortunately, the obtained concave-convex mesh reflector cannot be effectively supported based on the traditional 2-layered mesh reflector antenna structures. To address this problem, a 3-layered cable net structure with a shaped mesh reflector is proposed in [11] to realize the force balance of the concaveconvex reflector, as shown in Figure 1. Based on the approach in [11], an improved design technique is presented in [12] to improve the deployment characteristics of the 3layered mesh reflector antenna, and a corresponding prototype is developed to verify the validity of the 3-layered cable net structure approach.…”