Dynamics And Analysis Of A Rotating Electric Solar Sail

As human’s speed of exploring the space continues to rise,the deep space exploration is becoming a new kind of important task for human.What’s more,a stable and high-efficiency propulsion technology is the key and the first step for solving these tasks.In the recent years,Electric solar sail,a new propulsion concept,which can extract momentum from the solar wind almost without consuming any propellant,attracted a lot of attention for its special and great advantages in mass,attitude control,thrust force and the rate of decay.In this field,it has gained great attention to study the rotating deployment control,propulsion performance,orbit and attitude dynamics,etc.In light of the state of the art of the electric solar sail,this paper will focus on the dynamics and analysis of large-scale electric solar sail.And the main contents are as follows:Firstly,the dynamic model of a rotating electric solar sail is developed by the Lagrange method.Wire deployment and thrust compensation are accounted for in the dynamic model.Besides,the dynamic interaction between the attitude of spacecraft,the attitude of the wire and its length is explored via numerical simulation.Secondly,it is pursued to analyze the dynamics of a rotating electric solar sail based on a dumbbell model,which is composed of two microsatellites and wires connected to both of these two satellites,with focus on the coupled attitude-orbit dynamics.Besides,the attitude control problem of the dumbbell model of the electric solar sail is addressed considering the nonsingular perturbation equation of the orbital motion in Gauss form.Finally,numerical simulations based on heliocentric non-Keplerian orbits are performed for evaluating the propulsion performance.Thirdly,the absolute coordinate method is used to develop a multi-body dynamics model of a rotating electric solar sail with a single wire by discretizing the wire into a series of rigid rods.The deformation of the single wire is analyzed considering different spin rates and number of elements with a comparison with the results obtained using a bead model.Moreover,the investigation is extended to account for multiple wires and three-dimensional motions.Finally,the structural deformation and stability of the electric solar sail with several wires are analyzed through numerical simulations.