Preliminary Design of Spacecraft Attitude Control with Pulse-Width Pulse-Frequency Modulator for Rest-to-Rest Maneuvers

Abstract

In this paper, the preferred region of design parameters for quasi-normalized equations of single-axis attitude control of rigid spacecraft using pulse-width pulse-frequency modulator (PWPFM) is presented for rest-to-rest maneuvers. Using the quasi-normalized equations for attitude control reduces the system parameters, that is, the moment of inertia, the filter gain, and the maximum torque of modulator are merged to other parameters and the total number of parameters is reduced. Therefore, the computational burden is decreased and moreover, the results are usable for grouped parameters, regardless of the value of each parameter separately. The optimization is carried out by grid search method with the performance index of fuel consumption or number of thruster firings for a range of inputs. Finally, the suggested upper and lower bounds of parameters are obtained based on the optimization results.