Thermo-mechanical characteristics and stability boundaries of antenna structures in supersonic flows

In a supersonic airflow, a smart skin antenna model is analyzed to investigate the thermo-mechanical characteristics and stability boundaries of the structure. The skin is modeled as a multi-layer sandwich structure with a dielectric polymer. Especially, the polymer layer is embedded on the middle surface of the face sheets similar to the honeycomb core to perform the role of antenna or radar. In order to formulate the structural model including the geometric non-linearity, first-order shear deformation theory of plate and von Karman strain–displacement relations are adopted in this work. Also, aerodynamic pressure is obtained by the first-order piston theory for the aerodynamic. To get the numerical results, finite element method is used and Newton–Raphson iterative method is applied to solve the nonlinear equations of motion. For the validation of this work, present results are compared with previous data. And then, thermo-mechanical characteristics of the skin structures are fully discussed, especially. Additionally, effects of sizes and various shapes of dielectric layer relative to the enclosure layer are analyzed.