Attitude control of a rigid-flexible satellite by using reaction wheels and piezoelectric transducers for passive control of elastic vibrations

Resumo

Copyright © (2017) by International Astronautical Federation. All rights reserved.The main purpose of this paper is to implement a technique of passive elastic vibration control for a low Earth orbit satellite comprising two symmetric flexible solar arrays. While the solar arrays flexible vibration is passively controlled by using piezoelectric materials, the spacecraft attitude control is implemented by using the proportional integral derivative control technique. The idea is to compare the control effort when implementing the passive control with the control effort when using the piezoelectric for the same spacecraft. The solar panels are assumed to be in a sun synchronous rotation mode so its solar cells can continuously be illuminated by the Sun. The panels contain surface-bonded piezoelectric patches to implement the passive control of the solar panel elastic vibration. The gravitygradient torque as well as the torque due to the interaction of the Earth magnetic field with the satellite internal residual magnetic moment is included as environmental perturbations. The actuators are three reaction wheels for attitude control. Computer simulations are performed using the MATLAB® software package. For analysis, one considers a station-keeping correction maneuver performed by a thruster actuator. Resulting elastic vibrations are investigated while considering the cases in which i) only the attitude control subsystem is considered; and ii) passive vibration control is adopted through piezoelectric shunt damping. As expected, the use of the considered passive control strategy is able to mitigate elastic vibrations effectively, and also help in reducing control efforts performed by the attitude reaction wheel controllers.

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