Design and analysis of a novel deployable hexagonal prism module for parabolic cylinder antenna

Abstract

Abstract. This paper presents a novel deployable hexagonal prism module for parabolic cylinder antennas that exhibit characteristics of geometric scalability. The hexagonal prism module consists of six basic rib mechanisms distributed along the axis and parabolic directions of the parabolic cylinder. The basic rib mechanism along the axis direction is designed, and the position of each member in the deployed state is calculated according to the geometric relationships at the folded state. The basic rib mechanism along the parabolic direction is designed to ensure that the mechanism can be fully folded. The degree of freedom of basic loop mechanisms consisting of four basic rib mechanisms due to the splice of multiple modules is analyzed. The degree of freedom of the proposed hexagonal prism module is verified through simulations and experiments of a deployable mechanism composed of three hexagonal prism modules. The simulation and experiment results show that the proposed hexagonal prism module can offer synchronized and coordinated movement during the deployment process.

Kinematic and dynamic characteristics' analysis of a scissor multi-rod ring deployable mechanism

“…Han et al (2019Han et al ( , 2020 synthesized the ring truss antenna deployable mechanism using the constraint synthesis method. Ma et al (2021) proposed a novel modular parabolic cylindrical antenna with geometric scalability. Wang and Kong (2018) have studied various ways to construct deployable polyhedral mechanisms.…”

Design of an origami-based cylindrical deployable mechanism

“…Deployable mechanism (DM) refers to a kind of mechanism that can be deployed from the folded configuration into the desired configuration in a specific manner. The ability of configuration change enables DMs to be widely applied to aerospace engineering, civil engineering, and medical equipment, such as space antennas and reflectors (You and Pellegrino, 1997;Song et al, 2017;Andrews et al, 2020;Ma et al, 2021), solar panels (Kuang et al, 2004;Kumar and Pellegrino, 2012), retractable rooftops (Kassabian et al, 1999;Delaney, 2014;Cai et al, 2019), and emergency shelters (Kiper et al, 2015;Cai et al, 2015). Large-scale DMs are usually constructed by assembling similar modules with specific connecting approaches.…”