Thermo-mechanical Characteristics of Smart Skin Antenna Structures

Analysis on the thermo-mechanical behaviors of smart skin antenna structures under air flow is performed. The model is a conformal load-bearing structure, reducing radar cross section and increasing stealth functions are very important. The skin is modeled as a multi-layer sandwich structure composed of carbon/epoxy, glass/epoxy and a dielectric polymer. Furthermore, a dielectric layer is embedded on the middle surface of the sandwich structure to act as antenna or radars. The formulation of the structural model is based on the first-order shear deformation plate theory. Lastly, Newton-Raphson iterative method applied for solving the nonlinear equations of the thermal postbuckling analysis and numerical results are calculated by finite element method.