Design Technique for a Shaped-Reflector Antenna With a Three-Layer Cable Net Structure

Considering the contoured beam design technique applied to deployable mesh reflector antennas, this article presents a design method for a shaped reflector with a three-layer cable net configuration. First, the concave-convex surface of the mesh reflector antenna required to meet the far-field pattern in an area of interest is designed based on the direct expansion method. Then, a typical application of a rotationally symmetric reflector is designed and analyzed to produce a coverage beam for the continental United States (CONUS). Second, an improved geometry for the three-layer cable net is established by the design scheme. Next, the pretension iterative optimization of the three-layer-shaped cable net structure is carried out by combining the equilibrium matrix method and a topology optimization method. Finally, using the design results of this article as a manufacturing case, we develop a prototype and measure the shape accuracy of the mesh-shaped reflector. The experimental results indicate that the far-field pattern of the prototype contoured beam antenna is close to the computations, which demonstrates the correctness and effectiveness of the proposed design technique.