Title: A Modular Structural Design for Payload Replaceable CubeSat
Abstract: The advent of CubeSats has significantly reduce the cost and time in a space program, encouraging students and researchers to be involved in developing innovative space technology with short turn-around time and acceptable cost. Universities are now scrambling to develop their own CubeSats. Besides the academia, companies and research institutes are also willing to validate their own products via low-cost CubeSats instead of the time- consuming traditional approaches. As a result, the demands of CubeSats are growing rapidly. However, most programs take at least 2 years to develop a new CubeSat. An idea motivated for this study is that if a common bus could be made in advance and the payload could then be developed by the given interface, it would not only shorten the develop schedule but also lower the cost. The most important of all, it can make various CubeSats with the same bus system, which is the key concept of CubeSat modular design under the present consideration. To achieve the goal of substituting payload, the structural design of the CubeSat bus and CubeSat payload plays a crucial role in putting the modular concept into practice. There are four features of our structural modular design, which are “Convenience for development”, “Easy to assemble”, “Short development time” and “Payload Replaceable”. The first one is “Convenience for development”. It divides the CubeSat development into two parallel parts, the bus part (Fig. 1) and the payload part (Fig. 2). Hence, once the mechanical interface and electrical interface have been defined, we can produce multiple optional payloads regarding to the bus configuration. We believe that it will give the payload team more space and time to develop their dreamed product. The second feature is “Easy to assemble”. The design will integrate both mechanical interface and electrical interface. By simply integrating the bus and payload at the mechanical interface, the CubeSat has done its assembly. This will make the payload able to [1,2] plug-and-play, [3] or even self-integrated while docking in orbit. For the third feature is “Short development time”. Since we have already separated the CubeSat into two parts, each of which can have its own finite element model, which is known as the [4] “Sub-structuring” technique. Whenever one of the two parts need to be re-designed, it is only needed to rebuild the finite element model of the re-designed part. It will surely be faster than rework the entire finite element model like what we are doing nowadays. Moreover, although it still takes a lot of time to develop the first prototype of the CubeSat, when the numbers of CubeSat to be built increased, the advantage of structural modular design would emerge. Last but not least, the modular structure allows the CubeSat to put on different payloads that share the same interface, which is a main objective of this study: “Payload Replaceable” [5]. As illustrated in Fig. 3, there are three CubeSats in the graph using the same bus but different payloads. It demonstrates that the CubeSat’s mission can be variable depending on which kind of payload to be put on the bus. With the features mentioned above, the structural modular design proposed would be able to meet the great quantity in demand of the CubeSats.
Publication Year: 2021
Publication Date: 2021-01-04
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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Cited By Count: 2
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