Design & thermal modeling of solar panel module with embedded reconfigurable Air-Coil for micro-satellites

Spacecrafts need to maneuver their solar panels towards the sun and antennas towards the ground station for maximum solar power harvesting and communication with the ground station. For tracking purpose, usually magnetorquer rods, reaction wheels and permanent magnets are used, but they are heavier, expensive, and occupy extra space on the spacecraft. Keeping in mind the dimension, budget and mass constraints of small satellites, a system compatible with small satellite is worth consideration. Consequently, this paper focuses on designing and analyzing a solar panel module with embedded Air-Coil. Such an Air-Coil is an innovative idea for the replacement of heavier, bulky and expensive attitude control systems. The proposed Air-Coil is integrated in the internal layers of an eight layers solar panel PCB module. Complete degradation analyses of the solar panel have been done to ensure that it will meet the satellite power requirements at BOL (beginning of life) and EOL (end of life). The proposed embedded Air-Coil has been analyzed for the generated magnetic moment, resultant torque, power consumption and temperature increase of the complete solar panel unit. A steady state thermal model is proposed to measure the thermal resistance between top and bottom layers of the solar panel module, which gives an idea about the heat trapped inside the solar panel module. The designed embedded Air-Coil is fully reconfigurable where coil in each layer can be operated as a separate coil. The four coils in different layers can be attached or detached through switches in different configurations i.e. single coil, four in series, four in parallel, and their hybrid combinations. The analyses of power consumption, heat dissipation, temperature rise, magnetic moment and torque generation by different configurations of the designed Air-Coil have been performed. The generated magnetic moment is very high i.e. around 12Am2, which is enough to rotate a microsatellite by 90° in 200s. The efficacy of the proposed module is significantly higher than the already available systems with respect to mass, price, power dissipation, heat generation, and dimension.