Session
Poster Session 4
Location
Salt Palace Convention Center, Salt Lake City, UT
Abstract
Accurate estimation of on-orbit power availability under dynamic attitude conditions is critical to the reliable design of small satellite electrical power subsystems. During tumbling, detumbling, and mode transitions, rapid variations in solar incidence, eclipse exposure, and subsystem demand introduce strong temporal fluctuations that conventional static or orbit-averaged budgeting cannot capture.
This work presents a modular, time-domain power budgeting framework that models the coupled evolution of power generation, consumption, and energy storage under near-realistic attitude and operational conditions. Solar generation is computed from the time-varying Sun–spacecraft geometry for a multi-panel spacecraft, with per-panel MPPT, deployment state, angle-of-incidence effects, and eclipse transitions applied directly in the simulation loop. Attitude is propagated in the time domain, subsystem loads follow duty cycles across Phoenix, Safe, and Nominal modes, and battery state of charge is updated dynamically. The tool is implemented in MATLAB with an interactive GUI.
Document Type
Event
Included in
Twinning the On-Orbit Power Behavior of Small Satellites Using Time-Domain Solar and Load Modeling
Salt Palace Convention Center, Salt Lake City, UT
Accurate estimation of on-orbit power availability under dynamic attitude conditions is critical to the reliable design of small satellite electrical power subsystems. During tumbling, detumbling, and mode transitions, rapid variations in solar incidence, eclipse exposure, and subsystem demand introduce strong temporal fluctuations that conventional static or orbit-averaged budgeting cannot capture.
This work presents a modular, time-domain power budgeting framework that models the coupled evolution of power generation, consumption, and energy storage under near-realistic attitude and operational conditions. Solar generation is computed from the time-varying Sun–spacecraft geometry for a multi-panel spacecraft, with per-panel MPPT, deployment state, angle-of-incidence effects, and eclipse transitions applied directly in the simulation loop. Attitude is propagated in the time domain, subsystem loads follow duty cycles across Phoenix, Safe, and Nominal modes, and battery state of charge is updated dynamically. The tool is implemented in MATLAB with an interactive GUI.
