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Libration control of bare electrodynamic tether for three-dimensional deployment

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A Correction to this article was published on 11 February 2022

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Abstract

Various promising applications of electrodynamic tether have been proposed for space missions over the past decades. A crucial issue of these missions is to deploy an electrodynamic tether under a rapid and stable state. This paper aims to stabilize the libration motions of a bare electrodynamic tether during its three-dimensional deployment. The tethered system under consideration consists of a main-satellite and a sub-satellite connected to each other through a bare electrodynamic tether. A widely used dumbbell assumption considering the tether as rigid and inflexible is adopted to facilitate the dynamic modeling and analysis of the tethered system. A pair of active control laws is synthesized by simultaneously regulating the electric current and tether tension to achieve an efficient stabilization of the three-dimensional libration of the bare electrodynamic tether in the deployment process. Moreover, comparisons of three groups of numerical simulations are performed to evaluate the in uences of orbital inclinations and geomagnetic field models and the performance of the active control laws.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 11772150), by the Civil Aerospace Pre-research Project of China, and by the Natural Science Foundation of Hunan Province (Grant No. 2016JJ3141).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Nanjing, 210016, China

    Caoqun Luo

  2. State Key Laboratory of Mechanics and Control of Mechanical Structures, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Nanjing, 210016, China

    Hao Wen & Dongping Jin

Authors
  1. Caoqun Luo
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  2. Hao Wen
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  3. Dongping Jin
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Correspondence to Hao Wen.

Additional information

Caoqun Luo received his bachelor degree from Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, in 2015. Currently, he is a Ph.D. candidate from Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics majoring in dynamics and control. His current research interests are deployment, retrieval of space tether, and deorbit of space debris.

Hao Wen is a professor in dynamics and control at the Department of Aerospace Engineering, from Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics. He earned his bachelor and Ph.D. degrees from Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics. in 2002 and in 2009, respectively. His doctoral research has won the National Excellent Doctoral Dissertation Award (Top 100) from China, in 2011. He stayed at the York University in Canada as a visiting scholar from November,in 2014 to November, in 2015. Currently, he is an IEEE member and a senior AIAA member. His area of expertise is in the dynamic modeling, motion/vibration control, and ground-based experiments of space structures and spacecraft. His current research interests are space tether, in-orbit autonomous assembly, and deployable space structure.

Dongping Jin is a professor in applied mechanics at the Department of Aerospace Engineering, from Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics. He received his Ph.D. and B.S. degrees from Tianjin University. His research area ranges over the topics of space tether, structural dynamics, and nonlinear dynamics.

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Luo, C., Wen, H. & Jin, D. Libration control of bare electrodynamic tether for three-dimensional deployment. Astrodyn 2, 187–199 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42064-018-0020-0

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