The Design And Implementation Of The Generalautomatic Testing System For Solar Array Drive Assembly

Satellite is a complicate system with stringent specifications on stability and accuracy as its specific time and place of applications. Even small defects could be fatal when satellite starts its job on the orbit. Thus, one of the most critical procedures for the development of satellites is the ground testing before launching, specifically, by testing all the units in a meticulous way.In this thesis, we developed a ground testing system for satellites, targeting to the electrical and mechanical performances of the solar array drive assembly. As the design of satellites becomes serialized, traditional testing methods exhibit two shortcomings. One is that most of the software is specified to only one type of satellite, the other is manually collection of testing results is no longer fitted as the increasing of missions and deceasing of developing period. As a result, a generalized and automatic system is needed for such testing with respect to different types of satellites.Based on the hardware architecture of testing systems, firstly, the processes of communications between hardware and software were systematically analyzed, and the characteristics of involved protocol were summarized. Then, the protocol and communication mechanisms were both abstracted, while the protocol was designed as one table in database system. In the final, a novel generalized platform, which can be used for testing different types of the solar array drive assemblies, was developed.In addition, by summarizing rules from testing processes by customers, abstracting the testing processes of systems, abstracting and storing the testing policies as a table in the database, this platform can make automatic test by stored testing steps in the table and record the results as well. In this way, our platform successfully transformed the traditional manually operation and recording steps into automatic processes of testing and result recording, which makes it as a generalized and automatic platform in the area of testing system for d solar array drive assembly. Our system has been successfully applied to the testing of current series II and series IV driving facilities of the solar panels. The applications demonstrate that the characteristics of generalization can significantly decrease the cost of redundant development of similar testing software, and that the automaticity can save customers a lot of time and testing costs as well.