科研之友
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摘要
Large deployable reflectors typically use knitted metal mesh reflecting surfaces. Knitted metal meshes are characterized by excellent stowability properties. For the operation, meshes have to be tensioned, which leads to much lower accuracy. In order to keep the stowability advantages of knitted meshes but enhancing shape accuracy, a flexible reflecting surface material composed of carbon fibre reinforced silicone (CFRS) has been developed and investigated. Due to its low bending stiffness determined by the silicone matrix, the composite material can be manufactured easily with double curvature and nearly ideal parabolic shape. Compared to the conventional stiff matrix composites, which give high accurate double curved reflecting surfaces, an additional functionality is acquired by using a flexible silicone matrix. The use of this material allows for easy stowing and deployment. Because of the carbon fibres, the CFRS is characterized with a very low thermal expansion coefficient (measured and calculated about -0.36e-6/degrees C) with no moisture absorption or micro-cracking effects even under strong environmental cycles. These points indicate a high dimensional stability of the material. Results obtained from different thermo-mechanical and radio-frequency (RF) characterization tests for such CFRS surfaces confirm the expected behaviour. The measured RF properties, such as insertion loss, cross-polarization, reflectivity, and passive inter-modulation (PIM), show that the created material can be used even up to 15 GHz of RE Higher frequencies can be achieved in different cases. Several application examples are addressed further in the paper.
- 出版日期2010-5
