The Rigid-Flexible-Thermal Coupled Analysis for Spacecraft Carrying Large-Aperture Paraboloid Antenna

Abstract Since the thermal load would adversely introduce degradation to the normal operation of spacecraft, resulting in unpredictable thermal-dynamic behavior, thermomechanical coupling problems are important and have been investigated extensively. Based on the absolute nodal coordinate formulation (ANCF), a thermal integrated ANCF thin plate element based on the unified description is constructed, which could depict the displacement and the temperature field integratedly. By means of the proposed element, the heat transfer and continuum mechanics are integrated in the unified finite element method (FEM) mesh of revolving paraboloid antenna. Additionally, the ANCF reference node is introduced for describing the rigid central hub where the antenna is mounted on to make the rigid-flexible-thermal coupled response being captured in a unified analysis procedure. The solar radiation input and the surface emitting radiation are included in the heat transfer equations. Furthermore, the influence of the rigid body motion and the deformation on the radiant absorption are also considered with the self-shadowing. The established rigid-flexible-thermal coupled simulation is performed on a modified generalized-α integrator which solves the set of multidisciplinary governing equations synchronously. For revealing the nonlinear behavior of the rigid-flexible-thermal coupled system, the observed thermally induced vibration and perturbation on the pointing accuracy of the spacecraft are given in the results, and the feasibility of the presented method is proved.