Effect of Facet Displacement on Radiation Field and Its Application for Panel Adjustment of Large Reflector Antenna

• DOI: 10.1007/s10033-017-0135-z
• Publication Date: 2018-02-14T15:02:09Z
• Authors: Wei WANG; Peiyuan LIAN; Shuxin ZHANG; Binbin XIANG; Qian XU
• Keywords: 0103 physical sciences; 7. Clean energy; 01 natural sciences

Large reflector antennas are widely used in radars, satellite communication, radio astronomy, and so on. The rapid developments in these fields have created demands for development of better performance and higher surface accuracy. However, low accuracy and low efficiency are the common disadvantages for traditional panel alignment and adjustment. In order to improve the surface accuracy of large reflector antenna, a new method is presented to determinate panel adjustment values from far field pattern. Based on the method of Physical Optics (PO), the effect of panel facet displacement on radiation field value is derived. Then the linear system is constructed between panel adjustment vector and far field pattern. Using the method of Singular Value Decomposition (SVD), the adjustment value for all panel adjustors are obtained by solving the linear equations. An experiment is conducted on a 3.7 m reflector antenna with 12 segmented panels. The results of simulation and test are similar, which shows that the presented method is feasible. Moreover, the discussion about validation shows that the method can be used for many cases of reflector shape. The proposed research provides the instruction to adjust surface panels efficiently and accurately.