Design and Validation of an Articulated Solar Panel for CubeSats

CubeSats are recently adopted for increasingly advanced mission profiles, e.g. as base for tests of solar sails or formation flight. This also leads to higher power demands on-board of the satellite. Currently most CubeSats are equipped with solar cells on their surface. Some satellites also employ additional deployable solar panels with a fixed end angle to meet the increasing power demands. Further improvements are attempted in the current work by including actuators which allow the movement of the deployable solar panel in one degree of freedom. The proposed design is based on a small stepper motor which is incorporated with a planetary gear-head. The selected material for most of the components iss aluminum to minimize the mass of the system. After the completion of the design, the system was validated by vibrational and thermal computational analyses. A prototype of the final design was manufactured for tests and validation of the computational simulations. Vibrational tests were performed at the Space Dynamics Lab of Utah State University for the vibrational loads during a simulated launch. A comparison of the frequency of the first vibration mode showed a reasonable agreement between simulations and validation test