The design of optical satellite instruments often requires careful design of support structures. They transfer loads from the satellite platform to critical components and control the overall dynamic properties. Their structure needs to maintain some flexibility but, at the same time, also provide sufficient stiffness. Therefore, the allowable stiffness has to lie in a specific range. By applying a top-down approach for decomposition of system eigenfrequency requirements, stiffness constraints on boundaries can be defined for desired subsystems. With the decomposed constraints, components are optimized separately and, thus, more efficiently rather than the entire structure. For the support structure, mass is minimized using topology optimization. The classical optimization scheme of compliance minimization and volume constraint is turned into a mass minimization problem with appropriate directional compliance constraints. The approach is applied to the Wide Field Imager, an X-ray imaging instrument for the satellite telescope Athena.     «

The design of optical satellite instruments often requires careful design of support structures. They transfer loads from the satellite platform to critical components and control the overall dynamic properties. Their structure needs to maintain some flexibility but, at the same time, also provide sufficient stiffness. Therefore, the allowable stiffness has to lie in a specific range. By applying a top-down approach for decomposition of system eigenfrequency requirements, stiffness constraints o...     »