Conceptual Design of a New Huge Deployable Antenna Structure for Space Application

We present here a conceptual design of a new huge deployable antenna structure for space application. The antenna is constructed with a folded hoop and six folded ribs to form a rigid backbone. Through the ribs, there are several inflatable membrane tori. Among the tori, there are flexible cables to act as ribs. The rigid backbone, the inflated tori and the flexible cables construct the desired paraboloidal shape of the bound membrane surface. Such a novel model incorporates the advantages of both mesh antennas and inflatable antennas. The surface density is much lower than available deployable mesh and inflatable antennas. Through deploying simulations of the rigid structure and inflating simulations of the flexible structure, such a new conceptual design is predicted to be feasible for a huge deployable antenna with fairly high package ratio and fairly low surface density.