Tolerance Modeling and Analysis Considering Form Defects for Spaceborne Array Antenna

Abstract

Tolerance analysis is becoming increasingly important for tolerance design and optimization. When dealing with electromechanical products such as the array antenna, the form errors of the assembly must be considered. Traditional tolerance analysis with form errors relies on a double loop process, which is computationally expensive. A new tolerance analysis method is proposed in this paper, which can be achieved by a single loop process. First, a new tolerance modeling method considering form errors was proposed, it can represent the geometric error of a surface feature precisely. Then an effective sampling method was developed by introducing the variance separation method. An assembly simulation method was proposed to determine the final state of the whole assembly. Finally, the tolerance analysis was achieved based on the sufficient sample. The proposed analysis method was applied to an X-band spaceborne active-phased array antenna, numerical simulation results show the effectiveness of the method.

Keywords

• tolerance analysis
• tolerance model
• form defect
• array antenna
• assembly simulation
• tolerance sampling