Preliminary design and analysis of electrical power subsystem for a Conceptual 1U CubeSat mission

An electrical power subsystem (EPS) for a conceptual 1U CubeSat mission has been designed by thorough evaluation of the performance of the building blocks of the EPS. The requirements and functionalities of the EPS had been well defined, the functionalities include; the main power generation technology feasible, the energy storage technology allowed as per the guidelines and specifications for CubeSat development, and the types of converters necessary for the regulated power supply. The photovoltaic power generation system that was selected is made up of triple-junction solar cells, and the battery charging system and the power conditioning converters selected were based on single ended primary inductance converter topology popularly abbreviated as SEPIC. The battery storage approved was a lithium technology based. A maximum power point tracking algorithm which is known as perturb and observe (P&O) was implemented. The controller designed for the converters is Proportional-Integral (PI) controller. All of these have been well analyzed, mathematically modeled and simulated in Simulation environment. The results and implementation procedures are presented in figures and tables where necessary in the report.