Designing and Developing a 3D Model of Solar Array Deployment Mechanism for a 1U Cubesat

Abstract

Satellites are part of many innovations and inventions that significantly impact the global economy, particularly in precision agriculture, security, water management, disaster control and management, and environmental and weather monitoring. However, it is expensive for developing countries to acquire large space infrastructure such as satellites easily, hence using smaller crafts like the CubeSats. One cheap way to acquire CubeSats is by creating complex parts through reverse engineering. This would help keep the high capital expenditure rate in check and turn such countries from consumer nations to nations that produce their goods. This article discusses the design, synthesis, modelling, and component sizing of a solar panel array deployment mechanism for 1-U CubeSat to improve dynamic performance, weight optimization, system stability, and photovoltaic surface projection for maximum power generation. The design has a geometric dimension of 10.5 cm x 10.3 cm x 10.7 cm (in launch configuration) with two opposite wings. Each wing has two-panel mounts, having a length of 70 mm per panel, an inter-panel hinge space of 5.41 mm to allow for free rotation, and a yoke length of 35.64 mm, given a combined wing space length of 181.05 mm. With a limiting width of about 10 cm, the maximum combined (end-to-end) length for two foldable mounts (arms) was chosen not to exceed 20 cm on each side of the CubeSat. Dynamic tests revealed that an overall spring stiffness of 0.0263 Nm/rad is required to move the solar panels with a resultant torque of 0.0413 Nm from 0^o to 90^o. The complete panel deployment was achieved in 0.078 secs with an angular velocity of 20.2084 rad/sec, but it was relaxed to 2 secs to avoid bounds back oscillation due to reverse momentum.