Design, construction and validation of an articulated solar panel for CubeSats

The aim of the project was an attempt to design a solar panel for CubeSats to address the increasing power requirements. Therefore solution options for the realization of the various subsystems – mechanisms, solar cells and materials – were collected and analyzed. This included mechanisms for actuation, guidance, damping, release and control aspects. In order to maximize the power output from a specific solar cell, simulations about the influence of the sun-incident angle were performed. The difference in energy generation between body-fixed panels and articulated panels in one degree of freedom is in the range of 2 to 3. However, the improvements by articulating in two degrees of freedom did not show a big increase in generated power for the designated orbit in 400 kilometers altitude and 40 degrees of inclination. The proposed design is based on a small stepper motor incorporated with a planetary gear-head. The selected material for most of the components was aluminum to reduce the mass of the system. Afterward, the system was validated by vibrational and thermal computational analyses. The analysis showed that some of the components, in particular the attachments of the mechanism at the satellite, are suggested to be redesigned with steel instead of the earlier selected aluminum. For future work, the results from the analyses will be validated by the tests described.Validerat; 20101217 (root