Interactive design and advanced manufacturing of double solar panel deployment mechanism for CubeSat, part 1: electronics design

Recently, CubeSats have been in the first instance of research with fast time development and low cost manufacturing. Moreover, the capability of CubeSats increases and more complex design are planned. Therefore, an Interactive Virtual Manufactory includes: design, assembly, integration and prototyping is required to engineering objectives and increase in performance and quality. However, some limitations concerning data storage, mostly is the available on-board power, therefore a strong life-time. In this paper, the part one of design and realization of a novel deployable solar panel mechanism for CubeSats platforms will be presented with height performances. In addition, a measurement benchmark has been designed to investigate the micro-steeper motor during the deployment. Furthermore, in the development, an interactive design methodology has been implemented, thus, time, cost and risk have reduced. In particular, this work intends to explore the interaction between structure and control board discipline on CubeSats, a numerical analysis has been achieved, in order to build, manufacture and qualify the product developed. The results are presented as well; a prototype of the system has been realized for a 1U Cubesat, consisting of two deployable solar panel systems, the preliminary experimental results are very satisfactory, moreover, an excellent robustness and effectiveness has been achieved in micro-stepper motor control, the preliminary test results suggest that the proposed system will be able to meet the mission requirements. Finally, better performance with our proposed methodology has been achieved through integrate an interactive virtual prototyping in product design.