Acoustic Boundary Element Analysis of Geostationary Communication Satellite and Test Correlation via Direct Field Acoustic Test

摘要

Communication satellite structures are typically composed of large surfaces, such as equipment panels, antenna, reflectors, and solar arrays. Those reflective surfaces are often susceptible to damage due to acoustic loading. If not designed sufficiently, acoustic load can seriously damage the spacecraft during launch and even jeopardize the entire mission. In order to ensure adequacy of structural capability of the spacecraft bus and its pay loads, a common practice in the spacecraft industry is to test the actual flight hardware to the expected launch acoustic environment. In addition, acoustic boundary element method (BEM) is often utilized to guide the structure design and to define component and payload random vibration specifications early in the design stage. Hence, it is imperative that BEM analysis predictions correlate well to the test data in order to minimize the number of design iterations and to avoid structure failure during ground testing. In this study, acoustic BEM model of a typical geostationary communication satellite, based on Orbital ATK GEOStar-3 satellite, was created and analyzed. Direct Field Acoustic Test (DFAT) was performed on the spacecraft that is identical to the analysis configuration. The result of the analysis was directly compared with the accelerometer and microphone data acquired from the test. Commercial vibro-acoustic software, VA One version 2016.1, was used to perform the acoustic BEM analysis. The study presented in this paper is a progression of the BEM analysis validation presented in the AIAA SciTech 2017 conference.