A Quick Calculation Method for Radiation Pattern of Submillimeter Telescope with Deformation and Displacement

Abstract

Radiation pattern captures the electromagnetic performance of reflector antennas, which is significantly affected by the deformation of the primary reflector due to gravity and the displacement of the secondary reflector. During the design process of large reflector antennas, a substantial amount of time is often dedicated to iteratively adjusting structural parameters and validating electromagnetic performance. To improve the efficiency of the de- sign process, we first propose an approximate calculation method of optical path difference (OPD) for the deformation of the primary reflector under gravity and the displacement of the secondary reflector. Then an OPD fitting function based on the modified Zernike poly- nomials is proposed to capture the phase difference of radiation over the aperture plane, based on which the radiation pattern will be obtained quickly by the aperture field integration method. Numerical experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed quick calcula- tion method for analyzing the radiation pattern of a 10.4-m submillimeter telescope antenna at its highest operating frequency of 856 GHz. In comparison with the numerical simula- tion method based on GRASP (which is an antenna electromagnetic analysis tool combining physical optics (PO) and physical theory of diffraction (PTD)), the quick calculation method reduces the time for radiation pattern analysis from more than one hour to less than two min- utes. Furthermore, the quick calculation method exhibits excellent accuracy for the figure of merit (FOM) of the radiation pattern. Therefore, the proposed quick calculation method can obtain the radiation pattern with high speed and accuracy. Compared to the time-consuming numerical simulation method (PO and PTD), it can be employed for quick analysis of the radiation pattern for the lateral displacement of the secondary reflector and the deformation of the primary reflector under gravity in the design process of the reflector antenna.

Effect of Panel Misalignment Error Distribution on the Radiation Pattern of Leighton Chajnantor Telescope’s Antenna

“…Inspired by the method proposed by You et al (2024) for calculating the radiation pattern of a complete antenna with deformed primary reflector and displaced secondary reflector under gravitational load, the rapid computation method of the radiation pattern with panel misalignments on its segmented primary reflector is designed as depicted in Figure 3.…”