Dynamic shape control of conformal antennas

The present paper is concerned with dynamic shape control of conformal antennas on vehicles that may undergo deformations large enough to interfere with antenna performance. If the antenna is conformal to a vehicle or structure is will deform with the vehicle/structure. The objective of this paper is to develop a methodology and simulation technique to control the shape and contour of the antena and to keep it as close to the non-defomed state as possible. Dynamic shape contorl of such surfaces and structures is important to preserve integrity of the electromagnetic performance of the antenna. An exact elimination of the deformation of the whole structure therefore is not required. Our goal is to design the actuator with the purpose of controlling the dynamic deformation of the structure only in the region of the conformal antenna. As an example we consider a plate type structure with the conformal antenna situated in an arbitrary region. Given an external disturbance to the plate, we seek a distributed piezoelectric actuation, which is capable of controlling the motion of the region of the conformal antenna. The goal can be to either eliminate displacements in the region or keep it constant over the region. Our solution of this problem is based on integral formulations for both, the motion imposed by the external distrubance and the motion imposed by the distributed piezoelectric actuation. Comparing the kernels of the integral formation results in a simple solution of the problem: if the distributed piezoelectric actuation conicides with the statically admissible stress due to the external disturbance, the antenna is kep as close to the non-defomed states as possible.