Abstract
For long duration scientific missions with stratospheric balloons (objective of 3 month duration), renewable energy is used. Solar panels with mono crystalline silicon solar cells are mounted on both scientific and avionic gondola. A power conditioning board with Maximum Power Point Tracking (MPPT) is designed and currently tested. This board is called MC 2 : Communicant Conditioning Module. It allows controlling a Li Ion battery charge through PWM regulators. Moreover, outlets ON/OFF commutations associated to overcurrent’s protections are implemented in this board. The battery active thermal control is made by MC 2 autonomously. The main design drivers are mass, costs and efficiency. A CAN Bus between MC 2 and On Board Computer allows to have a commandability and observability of MC 2 through OBC. The overall avionic gondola is designed to be Single Points Failure free by using two segregated chains in order to be compatible with safety rules. The nominal chain is the main chain and use MC 2 with renewable energy. The secondary chain uses a primary electrochemical cell which feeds loads in case of undervoltage of the main chain. This overall architecture allows both chains to be designed without SPF free constrains. This paper describes the overall requirements and the design of MC 2 . The main innovation described in this paper is the way to implement MPPT: the MPPT algorithm is performed at the output of the power converter. This MPPT extracts maximum power of both solar panel characteristics and power converter. The main advantage is that this MPPT uses only one existing sensor (output current of boost converter) instead of using current and voltage sensor of each solar panel.
Highlights
All the simulation results presented hereafter are for a MC2 configured for avionic gondola architecture
It means that the power conditioning is in Maximum Power Point Tracking (MPPT) mode, and all the available power at solar panels is converted by the boost converters
This paper presents a power conditioning and distribution board for stratospheric balloons
Summary
The scientific mission called STRATEOLE 2 [1] is a campaign dedicated to advance the knowledge of coupling processes between the troposphere and the stratosphere in the deep tropics, and foreseen in 20202021 and 2023-2024. Avionics gondola is in charge of balloon flight control (control, localisation, communication...). CNES (French Space Agency) is responsible of the development and control of this gondola. This gondola is a kind of platform in spacecraft vocabulary. Scientific gondola corresponds to the payload gondola. In order to save developments costs both scientific and avionic gondolas shall use the same MC2 and solar panel cells and packaging technologies
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