Study of heater electric power control with autonomous distributed control

Abstract

The total electric power consumption of heaters in a spacecraft has to be controlled in order not to be in short. In conventional system, a server communicates with each heater and controls the total power. In this system, the time to communicate with heaters depends on the number of heaters and the time to develop a spacecraft is long. This paper proposes the autonomous distributed system which does not need a server. This system enables the control where the time to communicate does not depend on the number of heaters and the time to develop a spacecraft is short. This paper demonstrates that it is possible to control power consumption and temperature of heaters by both a simulation and an experiment. In the experiment, ZigBee, which is a wireless unit, is used to broadcast from the transmitter to the heaters. Show more