Stability and control of radial deployment of electric solar wind sail

Abstract

The paper studies the stability and control of radial deployment of an electric solar wind sail with the consideration of high-order modes of elastic tethers. The electric solar wind sail is modeled by combining the flexible tether dynamics, the rigid-body dynamics of central spacecraft, and the flexible-rigid kinematic coupling. The tether deployment process is modeled by the nodal position finite element method in the arbitrary Lagrangian-Eulerian framework. A symplectic-type implicit Runge-Kutta integration is proposed to solve the resulting differential-algebraic equation. A proportional-derivative control strategy is applied to stabilize the central spacecraft's attitudes to ensure tethers' stable deployment with a constant spinning rate. The results show the electric solar wind sail requires thrust at remote units in the tangential direction to counterbalance the Coriolis forces acting on the tethers and remote units to deploy tethers radially successfully. The parametric analysis shows the tether deployment speed and the thrust magnitude significantly impacts deployment stability and tether libration, which opens the possibility of successful deployment of tethers by using optimal control. Finally, the analysis results show that radial deployment is advantageous due to the isolated deployment mechanism, and a jammed tether can be isolated from affecting the deployment of rest tethers.Keywords Space tether Á Electric solar wind sail Á Multibody dynamics Á Rigid-flexible coupling Á Flexible structural stability Á Nodal position finite element method Á Arbitrary Lagrangian-Eulerian

A comprehensive review of Electric Solar Wind Sail concept and its applications

“…A first step in this sense is represented by the recent work of Li et al [36], who included the tether flexility in the dynamical model as well as their kinematic coupling with the spacecraft rigid hub. The authors concentrated on a radial deployment strategy, and suggested using a proportional-derivative control law to achieve a given spin rate of the spacecraft body.…”