Automatic Surface Mesh Generation for Design of Space Deployable Mesh Reflectors

Proper design of the surface geometry of mesh reflectors is essentially important to the performance of this type of space deployable structures. In this paper, a new design method is proposed to automatically generate desired surface mesh geometry and to fulfill the operating frequency requirement for mesh reflectors. Both spherical and parabolic working surfaces will be considered. With the proposed method, the surface geometry of a deployable mesh reflector will be constructed by facet approximation, with the so-called pseudogeodesic property. The proposed method is illustrated on a JPL reflector model, and is shown to be useful for deployable mesh reflector applications.