Interactive design and multidisciplinary optimization of geostationary communication satellite

Abstract

Currently, the design of large geostationary communication satellites is becoming more and more complex systems. On the one hand, customers are demanding high performance communications systems and this for 15–20 years orbital lifetimes. And the other hand, given the large volume and mass of communications satellites, an added constraint that resides in the volume under the launcher fairing which is sometimes represents a great handicap for the technological development of large space systems due to the technological limitation of launchers at the time. Increasing the performance and reliability of communication satellites, tools and methods are needed; the multidisciplinary design optimization methods (MDO) can be useful for this type of complex system. In geostationary communication satellite systems design, there are usually more than one design objectives, which a design team should take into account. These objectives involve system performance measures like mass, size, cost, reliability, power efficiency and system robustness. In a good design procedure, the tradeoffs between competing objectives should be incorporated so that the design team can make an informed decision. In this paper the generic geostationary communication satellite MDO problem is formulated to minimize the total mass of the satellite system under a number of practical constraints including launch vibration and acoustic disciplines. In this paper a gravitational search algorithm based on the law of gravity and mass interactions is introduced. In the proposed algorithm, the searcher agents are a collection of masses which interact with each other based on the Newtonian gravity and the laws of motion. From the results obtained in this paper and after optimization, the total mass of the studied GEO communication satellite is decreased by 185.3 kg (i.e., 7.3% of the total mass). In the case of the presence of two disciplines, acoustics and vibration, we notice that the mass becomes 3470 kg, which means the increase of the total mass of the system in about 124.2 kg and this in order to compensate the effects of these two disciplines.