Operational Capabilities on the Nanosatellite Attitude Control Actuated by Electropermanent Magnetorquer

This study presents the early-stage development status of the novel magnetorquer focusing on its operational capabilities to be applied in space applications. The aim is to show that the new magnetorquer can provide enough torque to a nano-scale satellite to perform a reorientation maneuver which is generally considered beyond the capacity due to its physical limitations. As the actuation process of the new magnetorquer differs from the conventional eletromagnet-based torquers, we designed the control input to have strictly three states only to detour the complexity behind the magnetization process which is subject to magnetic hysteresis. As the objective of this work is to prepare for the follow-on hardware experiment for demonstration, a software-based simulation environment is constructed to reflect the actual circumstances based on our previous measurements and new setups. The simulation result illustrates that such a pointing maneuver is achievable by employing the new magnetorquer with a relatively small amount of control effort while keeping the tracking performance within a predefined boundary.