Space Design and Modeling
Summary
At Harris Corporation (now L3Harris), I was part of a very experienced team of mechanical engineers tasked with design, analysis, installation, and test of unfurlable reflector mesh antennas (example shown below in high bay). This specialized team carried a plethora of heritage knowledge behind its work, and it showed on the very first day of my employment.
Space Design
For the majority of my time at this role, I was asked to develop flight space-grade multi-layer insulation (MLI) blankets, as well as flight cables, for the entirety of our space antenna products. Typically, this engineer would wait for the flight structure to be installed, and use those flight part assemblies as a means to develop the blankets and cables. However, for the programs I supported, schedule was always a challenge. The expectation was to have all blankets and cables developed and ready in parallel with the very flight assembly parts they were meant to be installed on.
To meet the demands of the program, novel prototyping ideas were developed by me to allow for schedule and part accuracy to be met. These included (but were not limited to):
Utilizing 3D FDM and SLA printing techniques of flight parts right at the tail end of their detail design stage (when changes thereafter, if any, would be very minimal) to allow for blankets and cables to be rapidly prototyped, iterated, and matured.
Utilizing Creo Sheetmetal for rapid blanket design and allow, in one click, to assess blanket manufacturability.
Developing parametric models in Creo Sheetmetal to create many blankets at once with intuitive Excel tables. This method saved over $20k in labor costs for the program. Standard was developed for the department and widely used in every program since.
Lastly, I was involved in support of design of flight structure piece parts. This required extensive knowledge of ASTM Y14.5 2009, as well as General Tolerancing and Dimensioning (GD&T).
Mission Modeling
To understand various mission level parameters and our capabilities, it was a necessary part of our statement of work to perform mission-level modeling and analysis. This was done with Systems Toolkit (STK), by a company called AGI. I was tasked with setting up and running various mission level scenarios with our products to meet customer requirements and enable our program team to meet various project milestones.
