Characterization of Wind Loading of the Large Radio Telescope

Abstract

This paper describes numerical simulations of windloads on the large parabolic reflector antenna RT-32 with a diameter of 32 m and a methodology of how calculated wind pressure can be transferred to beam-based digital model. The wind flow leads to a compressive load on the dish and thus to a deformation of the reflector. These deformations can cause a performance degradation of the input signal, or even loss of the observed or controlled object. The calculations show that the wind induced force is small in comparison with gravitational loads. Studies have been carried out at the Ventspils International Radio Astronomy Centre (VIRAC) to investigate the wind-loading effects on the radio telescope RT-32 structure. The wind loads are calculated with the help of an open sourced Computational Fluid Dynamics toolkit OpenFOAM