Archives of Electrical Engineering

Abstract

One of the most critical systems of any satellite is the Electrical Power System (EPS) and without any available energy, the satellite would simply stop to function. Therefore, the presented research within this paper investigates the areas relating to the satellite EPS with the main focus towards the CubeSat platform. In this paper, an appropriate EPS architecture with the suitable control policy for CubeSat missions is proposed. The suggested control strategy combines two methods, the Maximum Power Point Tracking (MPPT) and the Battery Charge Regulation (BCR), in one power converter circuit, in order to extract the maximum power of the Photovoltaic (PV) system and regulate the battery voltage from overcharging. This proposed combined control technique is using a Fuzzy Logic Control (FLC) strategy serving two main purposes, the MPPT and BCR. Without an additional battery charger circuit and without switching technique between the two controllers, there are no switching losses and the efficiency of the charging characteristic can be increased by selecting this proposed combined FLC. By testing a space-based PV model with the proposed EPS architecture, some simulation results are compared to demonstrate the superiority of the proposed control strategy over the conventional strategies such as Perturb and Observe (P&O) and FLC with a Proportional Integral Derivative (PID) controller.