Performance relationships between ground model and space prototype of deployable space antennas

Performance testing is very useful in the design of deployable space antennas. It is arduous and costly to carry out the prototype experiments on the ground because of the large aperture of the antenna and the difficulty of simulating space environments. Thus, a smaller replica of the antenna, called scale model, is used to achieve the performance testing for reasons of economy, convenience, and saving in time. In this paper, a two-step approach is proposed to predict the prototype performance of the antenna in the space environment according to the performance testing of the scale model. The first step is to analyze the similarity between the prototype and the model in the same environment. Different methods are adopted according to the different performance of the antenna. The scaling laws of the driving force of the deployable Astromesh antenna are established through the differential equations on the basis of the deployment dynamic equations, while the scaling laws of frequency are derived by the dimensional analysis method. The second step is to analyze the performance relationships of the scale model in the different environments. Experiments on the scale model can be performed to obtain the performance relationships. Finally, a complete example of the natural frequency analysis is given to illustrate the two-step method.