Preliminary design of an attitude control system for a high altitude platform

Within this document the process of developing different designs for the hardware of an attitude control system based on reaction wheels implemented in a high altitude platform is depicted along with a review of the most common attitude control systems used currently by different members of the aerospace industry. The process consists mainly in three parts: First, developing a simulation environment that recreates the conditions in which the platform is expected to operate and implement the physical laws that govern the motion of these kind of artifacts, and is able to compute the geometrical characteristics of the different reaction wheels tested. Secondly the performance of different candidate designs of reaction wheels is tested and analyzed. And finally a selection between all these candidates is performed taking into account different elements like the time that each design takes to correct the attitude of the platform, the weight of the wheels, the required angular velocity to maintain the desired attitude and the cost of the material employed.Ingeniería Aeroespacia