Investigation on attitude disturbance control and vibration suppression for fuel-filled flexible spacecraft

This paper is mainly focused on the attitude dynamics and control of a fuel-filled flexible spacecraft subjected to the thermal payload during eclipse transitions. The flexible appendages are considered as Euler–Bernoulli beams, and the sloshing liquid is modeled as in two modes multi-spring-mass models; the governing equations of this coupled system are developed by using Hamilton’s principle. Numerical results show that the spacecraft attitude responses consist of a quasi-static displacement and superimposed vibration. Then, we design an adaptive sliding mode and use the Lyapunov approach control law to control the attitude disturbance and suppress the thermal jitter and liquid sloshing for the fuel filled flexible spacecraft subject to the thermal payload. Numerical results are presented to verify the efficiency of the hybrid control methods. The results show that the adaptive sliding mode method might be effective to handle the steady-state errors and the Lyapunov control algorithm would suppress the residual vibration.

The attitude dynamics control and vibration suppression are investigated for a fuel-filled spacecraft with single solar panel subjected to thermal bending moment during eclipse transitions.