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Optimal Configuration of Four Reaction Wheels in Momentum Management Performance and Reliability Point of View

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Abstract

Many spacecraft benefits redundant reaction wheel for both reliability and the additional maneuvering capability. Finding an optimal configuration of the actuators is a vital step in designing and implementing an over-actuated reaction-wheeled attitude control system. The most important issue in every optimization is what parameter should be optimized. In this paper, a study of three practical configurations of 4 reaction wheels is carried out in order to find the optimum tilt-angle that maximizes both pointing-accuracy and momentum-management performance of the system, simultaneously. Obviously, in most space missions, the importance of pointing accuracy takes precedence over the momentum minimization of the wheels (especially for high-resolution remote sensing payload). In this regard, the optimum tilt-angle in pointing-accuracy viewpoint is found using an innovative method at first, and then it is used in momentum-management strategy. This paper deals with the Lagrange multiplier optimization method to remove the accumulated/remained angular momentum in the reaction wheels array at the end of each manoeuver. The key practical benefit of wheels momentum management is saving electrical power which is of utmost importance for all spacecraft. Moreover, the momentum envelope (workspace) of all configurations is investigated both before and after one reaction wheel failure to find a more robust and fault-tolerant case. Also, all the configurations are analyzed in terms of their attitude control performance parameters (momentum management performance, momentum envelope coverage, control effort, pointing accuracy, and reliability level) after one reaction wheel failure to find out which configuration is more robust to failure. Consequently, an optimal configuration in terms of each criterion has been introduced.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Aerospace Engineering, AMIRKABIR University of Technology, Tehran, Iran

    Ali Kasiri

  2. Aerospace Sciences and Technology Institute, AMIRKABIR University of Technology, Tehran, Iran

    Farhad Fani Saberi

Authors
  1. Ali Kasiri
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  2. Farhad Fani Saberi
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Correspondence to Farhad Fani Saberi.

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Appendices

Appendix A

Time response of the ACS after 1 RW failure under all 8 maneuvers (Fig. 20).

Fig. 20
figure 20

Time response of each configuration for both before and after one-RW failure

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Appendix B

Numerical results of performance parameters after 1 RW failure are presented in Table 6.

Table 6 Numerical results of performance parameters
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Figure 21 shows the bar plot of data presented in Table 6.

Fig. 21
figure 21

Numerical results plot of performance parameters

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Kasiri, A., Fani Saberi, F. Optimal Configuration of Four Reaction Wheels in Momentum Management Performance and Reliability Point of View. Iran J Sci Technol Trans Mech Eng 47, 2021–2043 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40997-023-00609-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40997-023-00609-1

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