Design and Performance Analysis of the electric Power sub-system for a Multi-Mission Microsatellite

This paper deals with the design and performance analysis of the electric power sub-system of a microsatellite for multi-mission applications. The solar array and battery design has been performed in order to have the required power on different sun-synchronous orbits without configuration adjustments. To effectively manage the power provided by the solar arrays and batteries a power control unit has been designed which controls the bus voltage and regulates the battery charge and discharge phases. A numerical code has been then developed to test the performance of the proposed electric power sub-system. The code integrates the microsatellite orbital motion with the power sub-system operations. Numerical results show that the proposed power sub-system is able to provide and control the required power on a large range of sun-synchronous orbits.