General Mesh Configuration Design Approach for Large Cable-Network Antenna Reflectors

Abstract

A well-designed mesh configuration is of great importance to the performance of large cable-network antenna reflectors. The motivation of this study is to find a general approach for designing appropriate mesh configurations of such reflector structure. By synthetically considering the shape-forming criteria, boundary connection conditions, and surface dividing ways, a versatile approach with the ability to generate desired spatial parabolic mesh configurations with specific engineering significance is proposed. In this paper, three shape-forming criteria based on the force-density method are developed. By introducing various boundary connection conditions, mesh configurations with different surface accuracies are achieved. Furthermore, by employing different polygonal elements to divide the surface, arbitrary polygon-faceted mesh configurations are acquired. The work presented in this paper will provide a valuable technical reference for the mesh design of large cable-network antenna reflectors and will lay a necessary foundation for subsequent dynamic analysis of such cable-network structures.