A Similarity Approach for Thermal Distortion Measurement of Large Spacecraft Structure

摘要

Thermal distortion is one of the key factors to satellite image geolocation accuracy. To evaluate the thermal stability of large spacecraft structure, a similarity approach of thermal distortion measurement on a down-scaling model is presented. Similarity relations of thermal distortion between downscaling model and the full-size structure were derived, and a thermal distortion test system based on 3D-DIC (digital image correlation) was built and used to distortion measurement of several structures with dimensions from sub-meters to meters. Results showed that measurement on the downscaling model could achieve nearly same precision as that on full-size structure, and could reduce test complexity, cost and time.