Power subsystem design of the malaysian youth satellite (mysat)
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Date
2018-06
Authors
Sasidaran Subramaniam
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Abstract
MYSat (Malaysian Youth Satellite) is a nanosatellite that is being developed by the
Universiti Sains Malaysia Space Lab team. Its purpose falls under the scope of earthquake
forecasting in which functions to sense and transmit electron density data using special
equipment during its one year orbit at Earth’s ionospheric altitude. This final year project
focuses on the design and implementation of electronic power subsystem (EPS) of MYSat.
The main task of EPS is to provide a continuous supply of power to the entire satellite bus
in orbit without failure. The power system consists of several main parts: Solar cells,
batteries, power distribution bus which consists of voltage converters and protection, sensors
monitoring different parts of the system and a microcontroller or an on-board computer used
to control the system. The output of this project is a simplest yet feasible EPS model on a
breadboard and to test its capability to ensure successful power delivery to all payload and
will be fabricated as an Engineering model in the form of the printed circuit board (PCB)
before its integration into the MYSat mainframe. The procedure of this project is to size
every stage of the EPS by considering the architecture, power budget, type of power
management and regulations, switching methods and trade-off between different hardware
that are reliable and available in the market. Initially, this system is made to be an
independent system for the testing purpose. Each critical component was tested individually v
followed by the combined circuit form to investigate the power output. The system is then
has incorporated a standalone microcontroller unit that functions to provide fault protection
and displays necessary voltage and current data at particular parts of the system. The control
system will be switched to MYSat On-Board data handling subsystem later on.