A Study on Switching Shunt Regulator for Satellite Power System

The resistive shunting for the fine control of a Direct Energy Transfer(DET) systems is fully developed, but the non-resistive shunting using variable size solar array segments is in progress. This paper presents the spacecraft power control through switching of solar array segments, which uses a fully regulated DET power regulation. This method eliminates a dissipative element and removes the associated design limitations which arise from the dissipative elements for radiating cooling in deep space. The switching shunt regulator comprises the switched Solar Array Shunt(SAS) modules that regulate the solar array power. These SAS modules connect/disconnect the solar array segments to/from the bus according to the loading in the main bus without significant variations in the dissipation level. In this paper, twelve segments are used in the shunting. In order to verify the basis of analysis, the computational result of an analytic loop gain is performed.