FEA-Opt Technology Co. Ltd. announces that the research team in Taiwan has utilized SmartDO to optimize the Remote Sensing Instrument of FORMOSAT-8 Satellite. And in the initial design stage, the weight of the primary mirror structure was successfully reduced from 9.8 kg to 8.8 kg.

Taiwan began to collaborate with US company on designing and developing its own satellite since 1994. In January of 1999, the first satellite FORMOSAT-1 was launched, and retired in 2004. Later in 2004 and 2006 FORMOSAT-2 and FORMOSAT-3 were also launched. In 2010, FORMOSAT-5 passed all design verification, and is waiting to be deployed. FORMOSAT-5 will carry the payload of Optical Remote Sensing Instrument completely designed and developed by Taiwan itself the first time.

Currently the FORMOSAT-8 satellite is already under development. FORMOSAT-8 will inherent the experience from FORMOSAT-5, and also carry the Optical Remote Sensing Instrument developed by Taiwan. The Opto-Mechanical system integration will be leaded by the Instrument Technology Research Center, and participated by the Opto-Mechanical Design Analysis (OMDA) Lab supervised by Professor Yi-Cheng Chen at the National Central University, who will be responsible for weight reduction of the mirror supporting structure. In order to tackle this challenge, the OMDA Lab utilizes SmartDO to achieve breaking through improvement.

In order to maintain good performance and low weight simultaneously, it is necessary to optimize the structure of the mirror. To accomplish this challenging task, the development team utilizes SmartDO as the tool and platform for design optimization. Upon the SmartDO platform, the team links together CAD and finite element software to optimize the characteristic dimension of the mirror structure. The goal is to obtain light weight, high stiffness and high-quality optical performance.

As a result, SmartDO successfully reduced the weight from 9.8 kg to 8.8 kg. With the verification by finite element analysis, all the performance indices were proven to be at least equal to the original design.

For more details of the full story, please see  http://www.smartdo.co/Newsletter/eNews_20150805_01_e.html

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FEA-Opt Technology Co. Ltd. is an international RD/Consultancy/CAE and Software firm. We provide superior RD/consultancy services to our customers, and customized solutions for each customer's special need.

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