Browse Topic: Electrical, Electronics, and Avionics
In a distributed electric-propulsion aircraft, multi-motor drive propellers distributed across the wings to provide the aircraft’s primary thrust. The electric control system enables rapid adjustment of propeller speed to control the overall attitude and flight path of the distributed electric propulsion aircraft. Furthermore, by utilizing the wake-induced acceleration effect generated by the propellers to alter the aerodynamic force distribution on the wing surfaces, it achieves gust attenuation. When encountering gusts, the PID control system adjusts the propeller slip to increase lift, thereby mitigating the effects of gusts on distributed electric propulsion aircraft. This paper employs PID control to regulate the steady-state performance of a distributed electric-propulsion aircraft under gusty conditions, with the objective of achieving the fastest return to a steady state. When encountering a headwind and a downdraft, the aircraft’s flight quality are severely disrupted; while airspeed, angle of attack, pitch angle, and rate of climb return to their original states or tend to stabilize, the effect of these forces causes the aircraft to lose height. After PID control is applied, under the influence of a tailwind disturbance, the aircraft’s descent under PID control is significantly less than under open-loop control, and it quickly returns to its original height and remains stable; Under the influence of downdraft turbulence, the aircraft under open-loop control is unable to return to its original height, whereas the aircraft under PID control drops slightly before returning to its original height.
Under on-orbit disturbances, large space truss-type deployable structures readily undergo vibration. Such vibration may degrade pointing accuracy and positioning precision. As a countermeasure, an internal-force self-regulation method is proposed using a magnetoelectric self-sensing actuator. This actuator combines Terfenol-D with piezoelectric material, thereby realizing force output and self-sensing. It can be placed at critical truss joints. By exploiting the ΔE and Villari effects of magnetostrictive materials, a resonant-force self-sensing mechanism is established. The actuator model is then integrated into the deployable truss’s dynamic model, and an LQR-based active vibration suppression strategy is derived. Simulation results show that the actuator detects static and dynamic output forces. Over a specific magnetic field range, sensing behavior exhibits an approximately linear dependence on the output force. Control outcomes confirm effective suppression of structural vibration, reduced response amplitudes at key nodes, and enhanced structural stability. Therefore, a novel method for vibration suppression in large deployable truss-type space structures is provided by these findings.
Long-term orbital missions require highly independent life-support systems, maintaining ecological stability under limited external support and subsystem attenuation. Conventional strategies are typically based on fixed threshold rules or deterministic mass-balance models and cannot adapt to disturbances or multi-objective trade-offs between resource safety and environmental load. This paper proposes a reinforcement learning framework for managing micro closed-loop ecological systems under reliability decay and environmental constraints. A reinforcement learning controller based on Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) is trained to learn stable regulation policies with random disturbances. A dynamic state model is constructed to describe the coupled and time-sequential elements, ranging from water storage, oxygen concentration, energy reserve, subsystem reliability to ecological load. Degradation propagation is integrated into the transition dynamics through reliability-dependent recycling efficiency. Simulation experiments demonstrate that the proposed policy maintains all resource variables within the safety margins while reducing ecological imbalance compared with traditional strategies. Consequently, the proposed framework provides an expandable control architecture for independent regulation of space station life-support systems.
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Space membrane structures, prized for their lightness, affordability, and ability to fold and unfold, hold immense promise for missions like deep space exploration, high-definition Earth observation, and advanced satellite communications. However, these structures are typically large-size, ultra-lightweight, highly flexible, and have very low damping. This leads to complex dynamic behavior featuring significant geometric nonlinearity, strong coupling between rigid and flexible motions, and uncertain parameters. Consequently, creating accurate yet simple mathematical models for designing controllers is exceptionally difficult, and traditional control methods that rely on such models often fall short. To tackle this problem, this study focuses on a membrane antenna spacecraft equipped with cable actuators, aiming to suppress its vibrations during attitude maneuvers. Using the Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (DDPG) algorithm, an intelligent vibration controller based on the Actor-Critic architecture is designed. This approach is data-driven, meaning it learns effective control strategies directly through interaction with the system’s environment, bypassing the need for a precise pre-defined mathematical model. Simulation results show that the controller demonstrated superior vibration suppression and strong adaptability across several key scenarios.
Graphene materials have recently been shown to produce measurable propulsion when exposed to light, raising the possibility of using them to enhance solar sail performance for satellite deorbiting. The pendulum-based experiments on graphene samples under controlled laser illumination inside a vacuum chamber and a quantitative model that describes the propulsion force as a function of laser power, illuminated area, incident angle, and ambient pressure were carried out. The measured pressure dependence and its shift with sample characteristic size point to Knudsen forces as the dominant mechanism. Orbital dynamics simulations incorporating this model show that a graphene-based sail can deorbit a 100 kg satellite from 660 km altitude roughly 21% faster than a conventional membrane sail of the same area, because the graphene configuration combines atmospheric drag with light-induced propulsion in a hybrid decay process.
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