The increasing demand for advanced and largeaperture space antennas has promoted the remarkable development of the aerospace industry. The circular Antennas could be as small as possible during transportation, while it should be as large as needed for effective operation when the antenna is fully deployed on the orbit. Based on the earlier results, a equivalent circular cylindrical shell model is proposed to represent the circular continuum antenna, and the nonlinear governing equations of motion are derived for the equivalent circular cylindrical shell system under thermal excitation. By means of numerical simulations in MATLAB programme, the influence of thermal excitation on the dynamical behaviors for the nonlinear system is investigated.