Detection of Voltage Anomalies in Spacecraft Storage Batteries Based on a Deep Belief Network

For a spacecraft, its power system is vital to its normal operation and capacity to complete flight missions. The storage battery is an essential component of a power system. As a spacecraft spends more time in orbit and its storage battery undergoes charge/discharge cycles, the performance of its storage battery will gradually decline, resulting in abnormal multivariate correlations between the various parameters of the storage battery system. When these anomalies reach a certain level, battery failure will occur. Therefore, the detection of spacecraft storage battery anomalies in a timely and accurate fashion is of great importance to the in-orbit operation, maintenance and management of a spacecraft. Thus, in this study, based on storage battery-related telemetry parameter data (including charge/discharge currents, voltages, temperatures and times) downloaded from an in-orbit satellite, a voltage anomaly detection algorithm for spacecraft storage batteries based on a deep belief network (DBN) is proposed. By establishing a neural network (NN) model depicting the correlations between each of the variables of temperature, current, pressure and charge/discharge times and voltage, this algorithm supports the detection of anomalies in the state-of-health of a storage battery in a timely fashion. The proposed algorithm is subsequently applied to the storage battery of the aforementioned in-orbit satellite. The results show the following. The anomalies detected using the proposed algorithm are more reliable, effective and visual than those obtained using the conventional multivariate anomaly detection algorithms. Compared to the classic backpropagation NN-based algorithm, the DBN-based algorithm is notably advantageous in terms of the model training time and convergence.