Abstract The design of the Qitai 110 m Radio Telescope (QTT) with large aperture and very high working frequency (115 GHz) was investigated in Xinjiang, China. The results lead to a main reflector with high surface precision and high pointing precision. In this paper, the properties of active surface adjustment in a deformed parabolic reflector antenna are analyzed. To assure the performance of large reflector antennas such as gain and boresight, which can be obtained by utilizing an electromechanical coupling model, and satisfy them simultaneously, research on active surface adjustment applied to a new parabolic reflector as target surface has been done. Based on the initial position of actuators and the relationship between adjustment points and target points, a novel mathematical model and a program that directly calculates the movements of actuators have been developed for guiding the active surface adjustment of large reflector antennas. This adjustment method is applied to an 8 m reflector antenna, in which we only consider gravity deformation. The results show that this method is more efficient in adjusting the surface and improving the working performance.
Keywords telescopes — methods: analytical — techniques: miscellaneous
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