Simulation of Non-Synchronous Deployment of the Large Deployable Hoop Truss Antenna

Large deployable antennas are used to improve the antenna gain with the development of mobile satellite communication. Large deployable hoop truss antenna (LDHTA) are widely used for its light-weight, high-precision, small launch volume, and high deployment reliability. Its dynamic modeling and analysis are essential in order to improve the mechanical design and the deployment scheme design of the antenna. In this paper, the flexible multibody dynamics model of a LDHTA is developed via the absolute nodal coordinate formulation (ANCF), which results in constant mass matrix without the centrifugal and Coriolis forces. Then the model is applied for the simulation of the non-synchronous deployment phenomena of the LDHTA considering the flexibility of the structure and decay of the driving force. The angular variance is used to evaluate the non-synchronous phenomena. Results show that the non-synchronous deployment can obviously increase the stress of the hoop struts of LDHTA.