IEEE - Aerospace and Electronic Systems - December 2021 - 13

Lelekov
period of the CubeSat rotation is much (by an order) less
than the orbital period. Otherwise, one needs to focus on
the statistically worst case for the selected CubeSat
configuration.
These estimates are obtained for satellites with an
MPP tracking structure of electrical power system. For
the direct energy transfer (DET) structure, such an estimate
is more difficult to obtain, since the power
depends on the operating point position on the SA I
V characteristics. This means that the output power for
the DET structure will be less than or equal to the
power for the MPPT structure; therefore, the estimates
obtained in the article can be used as an upper bound
for the DET structure.
Python3 was used in the calculations, the code and
results are given in the GitHub repository.1
[3] T. Etchells and L. Berthoud, " Developing a power modelling
tool for CubeSats, " in Proc. 33rd Annu. AIAA/USUConf.
Small Satellites, Aug. 2019, pp. 1-9.
[4] V. N. Gorev, V. Y. Prokopiev, Y. M. Prokopiev, L. D.
Sinitsina, and A. A. Sidorchuk, " Calculating electric power
generated by 3U CubeSat's photoconverters depending the
orbit and orientation parameters, " in Proc. IOP
Conf. Series: Mater., Sci., Eng., vol. 537, Jun. 2019,
Art. no. 022079.
[5] A. Z. Ribah, and S. Ramayanti, " Power produced analysis
of solar arrays in nadir pointing mode for low-earth equatorial
micro-satellite conceptual design, " in Proc. IOP
Conf. Series: Earth Environ. Sci., vol. 284, May 2019,
Art. no. 012048.
[6]
A. Porras-Hermoso, B. Cobo-Lopez, J. Cubas, and S. Pindado,
" Simple solar panels/battery modeling for spacecraft
power distribution systems, " Acta Astron., vol. 179,
pp. 345-358, Feb. 2021.
CONCLUSIONS
To calculate the energy budget in the case of free-oriented
CubeSat, we can use the previous estimates of the mean
and most probable available energy, adjusted for the used
solar cells and the solar panels filling degree.
The obtained results are fully consistent with the references,
but they clarify the amount of the most probable
power for CubeSat without an attitude control, which will
give an understanding of the real power margins.
Analyzing the obtained values of the solar panels
effective area, we can say that, in fact, we obtained the
average integral value of the CubeSat shadow area at various
axes of rotation. The physics of solar cells is such that
we calculated the most probable average area of a shadow
spot, created by a tumbling CubeSat of a certain structure
and format.
One can take into account the impact of panel (or part
of panel) failure to energy budget; to do this, it is enough
to properly set the corresponding weights wi during the
summation. The proposed method can be generalized for
the case of a more complex structure of satellite, only it
must be convex so that the sides do not shade on each
other; other normals directions should be specified.
REFERENCES
[1] M. R. Patel, Spacecraft Power Systems. Boca Raton, FL,
USA: CRC Press, Nov. 2004.
[2] J. P. Mason et al., " Miniature x-ray solar spectrometer: A
science-oriented, university 3U CubeSat, " J. Spacecraft
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[7] T.-Y. Park, B.-G. Chae, and H.-U. Oh, " Development of
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[8] M. Long et al., " A CubeSat derived design for a unique academic
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[10] J. W. Cheong, B. Osbourne, and J. Habets, " Effect of selfshadowing
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[11] S. Omar, D. Guglielmo, G. DiMauro, T. Martin, and
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[12] M. Pajusalu et al., " Design of the electrical power system
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[13] A. Lashab, M. Yaqoob, Y. Terriche, J. C. Vasquez, and
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[14] V. Beukelaers, " From mission analysis to space flight simulation
of the OUFTI-1 nanosatellite, " Master's thesis,
Appl. Sci. Faculty, Univ Liege, Liege, Belgium, 2009.
[15] A. G. Cappiello, " Design, implementation, and analysis of
electrical system architecture for Cubesat to ground
communications, " Master's thesis, Old Dominion Univ.,
Norfolk, VA, USA, 2019.
1.https://github.com/ttyUSB0/CubeSat-FreeOrient-Power
DECEMBER 2021
[16] S. Acharya et al., " Modeling and design of electrical
power subsystem for CubeSats, " in Proc. Int. Conf. Smart
Energy Syst. Technol., Sep. 2019, pp. 1-6.
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