Design and Simulation of a Flexible Bending Actuator for Solar Sail Attitude Control

What is it about?

This paper presents the design of a flexible bending actuator using shape memory alloy (SMA) and its integration in attitude control for solar sailing. The SMA actuator has advantages in its power-to-weight ratio and light weight. The bending mechanism and models of the actuator were designed and developed. A neural network based adaptive controller was implemented to control the non-linear nature of the SMA actuator. The actuator control modules were integrated into the solar sail attitude model with a quaternion PD controller that formed a cascade control. The feasibility and performance of the proposed actuator for attitude control were investigated and evaluated, showing that the actuator could generate 1.5 × 10−3 Nm torque which maneuvered a 1600 m2 CubeSat based solar sail by 45° in 14 h. The results demonstrate that the proposed SMA bending actuator can be effectively integrated in attitude control for solar sailing under moderate external disturbances using an appropriate controller design, indicating the potential of a lighter solar sail for future missions.

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Photo by Hanson Lu on Unsplash

Photo by Hanson Lu on Unsplash

Why is it important?

The significance of this study is two-fold: (1) the scalable attitude control approach for solar sails of different size and (2) the use of SMA actuators as an active actuation method in solar sailing. The proposed approach improves the scalability limitation in the existing works discussed above by implementing an SMA actuator on each sail boom that rotates a sail membrane to control the torque for attitude control

Perspectives