Modeling of the CubeSat deployment and initial separation angular velocity estimation

Abstract

CubeSats applications are recently advanced from purely education tools to actual scientific missions. To meet the high requirements of such scientific missions, the nonlinear deployment dynamics and the initial separation angular velocity from the deployer are required to be investigated and estimated. In this paper, the deployment process is described by single-degree-of-freedom (SDOF) and three-degree-of-freedom (TDOF) vibro-impact models for different deployment stages, and the evolution process from doubling bifurcation to chaos is visualized by the Poincaré section and global bifurcation graph. According to the simulation results, reasonable initial separation angular velocities are consequently estimated. Simultaneously, the largest ratio of the excitation frequency and the natural frequency of the satellite in the deployer is found, which guides the design of CubeSat deployer.