Study Of High Stiffness Rotary Hinge Locking Mechanism Based On Preload Spring

Spaceborne planar antennas need deployable truss structure to ensure the highprecision and high stiffness. Rotary hinge plays an important role in the supportstructure of the deployable planar antenna. In order to get high stiffness of deployedantenna, it’s feasible to equip locking mechanisms that worked cooperated with rotaryhinges to lock the deployed antenna. At the same time, high stiffness rotary hingelocking mechanism must get the character of high preload, small size and low weight tosave the cost of being used in the deployable planar array antenna.In this paper, high stiffness rotary hinge locking mechanism that used inspaceborne planar antenna was taken for the study. And with the idea of using preloadspring to improve the locked stiffness, the design of precept, analysis, simulation andtests of prototype was carried out.Locking mechanism based on preload spring was brought forward and lockingmechanism was divided into active half and follower half. Two kinds of active half mainhook was chosen and structural design was progressed with the goal of interchangeableparts between the two kinds of active main hook. Also the static strength of the majorcomponents was checked and the structural of the rotary hinge that was used withlocking mechanism was designed. Then the trigger force of the locking force wascalculated.On the basis of theoretical stiffness analysis of the rotary hinge locking mechanism,the FE model of the rotary hinge locking mechanism was built in the ANSYS FEsoftware. According to the calculative principle of static stiffness, the static analysis andthe harmonic analysis based on prestressed modal analysis was carried out. Then thestatic stiffness and dynamic stiffness of the two kinds of hook of the locking mechanismwas calculated according to the results of the analysis. It’s verified that the lockingmechanism with two kinds of hooks both are high stiffnessAfter change the high stiffness rotary hinge locking mechanism into2D, the triggertime of it was calculated. The3D models were converted into ADAMS by usingMech/Pro2005. And then ADAMS models of locking mechanism with two kinds ofhooks was established included the model of locking mechanism of leaf spring hookthat was built into rigid-flexible coupling based on ANSYS modal neutral file. By takenmotion simulation of the ADAMS models by mean of script control, the feasibility ofthe action sequence of the parts of the locking mechanism and the correctness of thecalculation of trigger time are verified.At the basis of structural design and analysis above, the prototype and tools of therotary hinge locking mechanism was developed. The test-bed was built in order to testthe prototype. The tests, which included locking force, the accuracy of repeat lock, locked stiffness, drive torque and vibration environment testing, verified the analysisand the design. Finally the compare of the performance of the two kinds of main hookrevealed that the leaf spring hook is superior to the rotary main hook.