Mesh topological form design and geometrical configuration generation for cable-network antenna reflector structures

摘要

A well-designed mesh shape of the cable net is of essential significance to achieve high performance of cable-network antenna reflectors. This paper is concerned with the mesh design problem for such antenna reflector structure. Two new methods for creating the topological forms of the cable net are first presented. Among those, the cyclosymmetry method is useful to generate different polygon-faceted meshes, while the topological mapping method is suitable for acquiring triangle-faceted meshes with different mesh grid densities. Then, the desired spatial paraboloidal mesh geometrical configuration in the state of static equilibrium is formed by applying a simple mesh generation approach based on the force density method. The main contribution of this study is that a general technical guide for how to create the connectivities between the nodes and members in the cable net is provided from the topological point of view. With the new idea presented in this paper, multitudes of mesh configurations with different net patterns can be sought by a certain rule rather than by empiricism, which consequently gives a valuable technical reference for the mesh design of this type of cable-network structures in the engineering.