An approach for the robust design of the power systems of small satellites

Vasile, Massimiliano and Alicino, Simone (2014) An approach for the robust design of the power systems of small satellites. In: 65th International Astronautical Congress (IAC 2014), 2014-09-29 - 2014-10-03, Toronto. (Unpublished)

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Abstract

The paper presents an approach to Robust Model-Based System Engineering (RMBSE) applied to the design of the power system of a small-satellite. Tow simple low-fidelity parametric models of the power and telecommunication systems are used to compute the mass and power requirements for different orbital geometries. The low model fidelity implies that model and parameters are affected by epistemic uncertainty. This uncertainty is commonly captured by adding margins at subsystem and system level. In this paper instead, the effect of epistemic uncertainty is modelled with p-boxes on finite sets of values and propagated through the system models to compute the upper and lower expectation on the mass budget. A robust optimisation procedure is then introduced to find the design solution that minimises system mass and the impact of uncertainty.