OPTIMAL SURFACE ADJUSTMENT OF HAYSTACK-ANTENNA

Mehdi S. Zarghamee', M. IEEE, and Joseph Antebi

Introduction

Adjustment is a set of motions imposed on ail or a subset of adjustment mechanisms. Motion

of an adjustment mechanism will result in surface deformations denoted as its influence surface.
In an ideal adjustment system, the influence surface of each adjustment mechanism is compact,
i.e. it affects only a part of the reflector surface equal to the tributary aperture area of that
mechanism, and the set of all adjustments is complete in the sense that all feasible surface
distortions can be corrected by appropriate choice of adjustments. Unfortunately, the adjustment
system of most existing antennas is far from ideal. In most cases the influence surface of an
adjustment mechanism affects the tributary areas of other adjustment mechanisms. Furthermore,
in addition to the inability of the surface adjustment system to correct for errors such as panel
manufacturing, which have short wavelengths, the set of adjustment mechanisms is often
incomplete and cannot compensate for all surface distortions, even when such distortions have
large wave lengths.

The purpose of this paper is to present a procedure for computing, from the RF-path length
changes obtained from holography, the magnitude of the adjustments required to optimize the
surface at a specific elevation angle.

Antenna Structure and Adjustment Mechanisms

Haystack is a fully steerable, altitude-over azimuth, 120-ft-diameter Cassegrain antenna. The

major elements of the backstructure, as shown in Figure 1 , are two parallel trunnion trusses,
which rotate about the elevation axis and support a 60-ft-diameter heavy ring truss, referred to
as Ring 3. In addition, there are five lighter concentric ring trusses, referred to as Rings lA, 1 ,
2, 4, and 5. The rings are connected to each other by radials and diagonals not all shown in
the figure.

The reflector shell consists of 32 inboard and 64 outboard wedge-shaped aluminum honeycomb
panels. The inboard panels extend from the center of the reflector to a 1 in. thick by 24 in.
wide solid ring plate, referred to as the splice plate, supported on Ring 3. The outboard panels
extend from the splice plate to the outer perimeter. The panels are connected to each other
at discrete points along their radial edges by preloaded expanders. The expanders impose a
relative circumferential displacement between the adjacent panels; such a relative circumferential
displacement causes normal deformation of the shell surface. The preload is produced by 28
circumferential prestressed cables that run over cable guide rollers mounted on the rear surface
of the panels. Increasing the guide roller offset increases the radially inward component of cable
tension, and thus decreases the curvature of the panel. There are cable guides with fixed
offsets near the edges of each panel and one or two cable guides with adjustable offsets near
the center of each panel.

The splice plate ring is made of 32 segments of curved plate preloaded circumferentially, and
supported on a set of four adjustable double standoffs on Ring 3. The panels are supported
on adjustable standoffs on each of the other structural ring trusses. The standoffs are normal
to the surface of the shell; they restrain the shell along the normal but are flexible with respect
to any tangential motion. Since the primary reflector is parabolic, and therefore nearly spherical,
to restrain the reflector from sliding as a rigid body by tangential motion, shear studs are used
between the reflector and the trunnion truss. These shear studs were intended to allow relative
sliding of the reflector and the backstructure along the axis of the paraboloid. Later, due to their

Principals, Simpson Gumpertz & Heger Inc., Arlington, MA 02174

0-7803 '30-5152 83 0 0 0 1552 IEEE 854
nonlinear behavior, they were fixed with fixtures that can be used to adjust the height of the
panel surface at and near shear stud locations.

Therefore, there are four types of adjustment mechanisms: expanders between panels, standoffs
that support the panels at structural ring trusses, shear studs, and the cable guide offsets that
deform the panels individually.

Formulation

Let us denote the index set of adjustment mechanisms as I,and the index set of surface points
on the aperture at which the RF-path length errors are obtained from holography as J.

Let us denote the inner product of two vectors U and v, defined over the aperture surface grid,
as follows:
< u,v > = U'%V (1)
where A, is a diagonal matrix whose j-th term is the illumination-weighted-area multiplier for the
surface point set J.

Let a = {a.} denote the magnitude of adjustments defined over the index set I,and d = {di}
denote the'magnitude of RF-path length error defined over the surface point set J.

Let B = {B } be the RF-path length error at the surface node j due to a unit motion of
adjustment I! hence B is the transformation that relates adjustments to surface distortions. In
other words, if the error in the RF-path length before the adjustment of expanders is do, and
after adjustment is d, we must have

d = do + E - a (2)
The purpose is to find the adjustments a which minimize the RF-path length errors.

The value of a must be so selected as to minimize the function F (which is proportional to the
rms' of the RF-path length errors) expressed in terms of d as follows:

F = d'A,d (3)
If we substitute (3) in (4), we obtain:

F = ddA,do+2ddA,Ba+a'B'A,Ba (4)

In absence of any constraint on adjustments, the minimization of F involves solving a set of

linear equations to determine a. When the adjustments are constrained, the minimization of F
Involves solving a quadratic programming problem.

Finlte-Element Model of the Haystack Antenna

To compute the gravity deformations of the parabolic surface as the antenna travels from the
holography angle to the bias-rig angle and to compute the influence surfaces for different
adjustment mechanisms, a finite-element model of the antenna structure is developed.

In this model, the backstructure is represented as a pin-jointed truss with three degrees of
freedom per node, except that member bending and six degrees of freedom per node are
assigned to Ring 3 and the trunnion trusses.

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The reflector panels and the splice plate are modelled as quadrilateral elements with sandwich
panel properties. Expander motions are simulated by imposing circumferential displacements
at the nodes located on the line of symmetry of the half-structure model. For each expander,
the influence surface of the imposed circumferential motion is computed.

The standoffs and shear studs are modelled as beam elements. The adjustment of the height
of a panel at a standoff located on a structural ring truss or at a shear stud is simulated by
imposing a normal displacement at the corresponding node on the reflector panel.

The cables are not modelled, although their additional stiffness in carrying circumferential stress
resultants is included in the panel stiffness. Since a change of cable guide offset causes a kink
in the pretensioned cable running through the guide, its effect is simulated by imposing a set
of three self-equilibrating radial forces to the surface of the reflector (acting in the plane of the
cable): one force at the guide under consideration and two forces at the adjacent guides.

Algorithm

The process of surface adjustment of Haystack antenna is an iterative one, because of the
approximations and errors in (a) the holography and the diffraction effects that cannot be
eliminated, (b) the accuracy of the finite-element model used for the computation of influence
surfaces, (c) the accuracy of the method of solution for the optimal surface adjustments, and
(d) the extraneous thermal effects that are present during holography. In addition, the j?
knowledge of the actual precompression across the expanders Is not available, although
repeated application of the adjustment procedure has helped us build good estimates. Once
a loose expander is encountered, the precompression is known and can be tracked in the
subsequent adjustments.

The steps in an adjustment cycle are as follows: (1) start with a holography map after the
subtraction of all diffraction effects, and correct for gravity effect, when the mapping elevation
angle is not the same as the bias rigging angle, and for the non-optimal subreflector position:
(2) compute required standoff and shear stud adjustments, and predict surface deviations after
standoff and shear stud adjustments; (3)compute optimal expander adjustments, and predict
surface deviations after optimal expander adjustments; and (4) compute optimal cable offsets,
and predict surface deviations after optimal cable offset adjustments.

The RF-path length errors before and after several cycles of expander adjustment are shown in
Figure 2. Before adjustment, the total surface rms of the antenna is 639 micron (25.1mil); the
part of the surface which is inboard of the splice plate has a surface rms of 490 micron
(19.3 mil) and the part that lies outboard of the splice plate has a surface rms of 739 micron
(29.1 mil). After a few cycles of adjustment, the surface rms decreased to a total of 267 micron
(10.5 mil), 241 micron (9.5 mil) in the inboard part and 284 micron (11.2 mil) in the outboard
part of the surface.

Conclusions

A procedure has been developed for the optimal adjustment of the primary reflector surface of
an antenna. This procedure, when applied to Haystack radio telescope antenna, involves the
iterative adjustment of standoffs and shear studs, expanders, and cable guide offsets in the back
of the panels. Optimal adjustments are selected to minimize the resulting surface rms of the
antenna, subject to the constraints of loss of precompression across expanders. It has been
demonstrated that the procedure can be used effectively to improve the surface rms of the
Haystack antenna to our goal of less than 200 micron (8 mil).

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 Fig. 1 - Haystack antenna backstructure

Fig. 2 - Holography map of RF-path length changes before and after several cyles of
expander adjustments.
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