Abstract
Spacecrafts need to maneuver their solar panels towards the sun and antennas towards the ground station for maximum solar power harvesting and communication with the ground station. For tracking purpose, usually magnetorquer rods, reaction wheels and permanent magnets are used, but they are heavier, expensive, and occupy extra space on the spacecraft. Keeping in mind the dimension, budget and mass constraints of small satellites, a system compatible with small satellite is worth consideration. Consequently, this paper focuses on designing and analyzing a solar panel module with embedded Air-Coil. Such an Air-Coil is an innovative idea for the replacement of heavier, bulky and expensive attitude control systems. The proposed Air-Coil is integrated in the internal layers of an eight layers solar panel PCB module. Complete degradation analyses of the solar panel have been done to ensure that it will meet the satellite power requirements at BOL (beginning of life) and EOL (end of life). The proposed embedded Air-Coil has been analyzed for the generated magnetic moment, resultant torque, power consumption and temperature increase of the complete solar panel unit. A steady state thermal model is proposed to measure the thermal resistance between top and bottom layers of the solar panel module, which gives an idea about the heat trapped inside the solar panel module. The designed embedded Air-Coil is fully reconfigurable where coil in each layer can be operated as a separate coil. The four coils in different layers can be attached or detached through switches in different configurations i.e. single coil, four in series, four in parallel, and their hybrid combinations. The analyses of power consumption, heat dissipation, temperature rise, magnetic moment and torque generation by different configurations of the designed Air-Coil have been performed. The generated magnetic moment is very high i.e. around 12Am2, which is enough to rotate a microsatellite by 90° in 200s. The efficacy of the proposed module is significantly higher than the already available systems with respect to mass, price, power dissipation, heat generation, and dimension.
Highlights
Many academic institutions and space agencies around the globe are working on the design and development of small satellite projects [1, 2], because of its low price and short development time
Commercial off the shelf (COTS) components are used for the development of small satellites which are inexpensive and available in the local market
The generated magnetic moment is very high i.e. around 12Am2, which is enough to rotate a microsatellite by 90 ̊ within a time span of 3, 4 minutes
Summary
Many academic institutions and space agencies around the globe are working on the design and development of small satellite projects [1, 2], because of its low price and short development time. The purpose of this work is to design and analyze a fully modular solar panel with embedded Air-Coil according to the required microsatellite standards. Air-Coil is a preferable design in terms of pointing accuracy, cost, mass, size, and mass for microsatellite [6] They are almost massless (PCB traces), consume minimum possible power, and generate torque according to the design requirements. The direction of D~ is represented by the right hand rule which illustrates that grip the solenoid in right hand such that the curly fingers point in the path of current the thumb in the axis of solenoid provides the direction of magnetic moment D~ as shown in Fig 2 [10] When this coil is employed in a magnetic field, a torque (τ) is applied upon it which is given by (2) [8, 9];.
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