A New Generation of Electrical Power Supply for Telecom Satellites
Abstract
This paper presents the main features of the new power subsystem generation for the Thales Alenia Space (TAS) Spacebus platforms.All its components (Solar Array, Solar Array Drive Mechanism, Power Conditioning Unit and Lithium-Ion batteries) have been upgraded, taking advantage of the latest available technologies. The modularity has been improved to perfectly match the sizing of each unit to the satellite power level requirement. These two improvements lead to optimal mass and cost over the whole power range.In addition, the customer benefits from a fully automatic operation of the subsystem, including redundancy, making the ground station workload negligible, even during eclipse periods. Finally, the capability to support any type of payload has been further improved, in terms of overall power level and operating modes. Payload pulsed operation capability has been especially increased to support all anticipated mission requirements. In parallel to the PCU hardware, a detailed electrical model has also been developed and correlated to analyse the regulation performance in any nominal or degraded mode. An extensive set of tests provides a verification of performances and interfaces, hardware as well as software.This paper will first describe the main requirements considered in this development. Then, the architecture will be detailed, showing how the requirements have been fulfilled. The design of each unit will be shortly presented, and finally the correlation between the regulation analysis model and the EQM measurements will be illustrated.
- Publication:
-
ESA Special Publication
- Pub Date:
- August 2014
- Bibcode:
- 2014ESASP.719E..63B