Development of a passive attitude control system for the VELOX-LYON-1 student CubeSat

The goal of this report is to summarize the ideas, designs, methodologies and data of this final year project. This final year project report gives a fundamental understanding of the attitude control system of a Cube Satellite (CubeSat) and the detailed explanation of the various experimentations conducted on the selections and sizing of the hardware components. The type of attitude control system chosen for this satellite project is passive magnetic attitude control system which is a pure passive control system ideal for nanosatellites such as CubeSats. This attitude control system is designed for VELOX-LYON-1 3U CubeSat from Satellite Research Centre at Nanyang Technological University. Passive Magnetic Attitude Control system (PMAC) mainly consists of bar magnets and hysteresis rods. In this report, characterizations of the permanent bar magnets and hysteresis rods are performed experimentally. Bar magnets with 3 different dipole moments were characterized. The hysteresis rod material chosen is HyMu-80 Permalloy. Various experiments are conducted with the goal of evaluation the actual magnetic behaviours of both the magnets and the hysteresis rods. As for the bar magnets, actual dipole moments should be examined while for hysteresis rods, its magnetic parameters such as remanence, coercivity and saturation have to be studied. Before the sizing and selections of the hardware, basic aerodynamic theories were being introduced and discussed as the space environmental torques are seen as a form of disturbances to the CubeSat which will affect the attitude determination and control. Space environmental torques are computed and the sizing of the bar magnets depends on the calculated values. The data collected has been further processed and analysed. The results of the experiments are also been discussed in-depth.Bachelor of Engineering (Electrical and Electronic Engineering