Energy management of a “PocketQube” satellite

The goal of the SMOG-1 mission is to measure the electromagnetic smog in low earth orbit emitted by TV stations in the 400-800Mhz band. It must be mentioned that there was no 100% successful mission in the “PocketQube” satellite size (50×50×50 mm) which has four times less area as a conventional 100×100×100 mm “Cubesat”. Therefore the PV energy management became really important. The reason behind the SMOG-1 “PocketQube” energy management simulation in Matlab code was to achieve a credible result for the cycle PV energy production to predict the precious amount of energy which could be used to heat the battery of the satellite besides the necessary functions energy needs. In the early stage of the development it was inevitable to encounter some difficulties. One of them was that it was necessary to give basic simulation results to the project team to help their planning phase of the satellite. There were few missing parameters about the structure of the satellite and about the PV cells, which we have managed to get from the literature. As a matter of fact, a 3D design software called SkecthUp and Inventor was used to simulate the shading of the PV modules and software called PVSYST to create the PV module parameters of the satellite and using the calculated parameters necessary codes in Matlab could have been written to simulate the shading of the PV modules. With the obtained cycle PV energy production, the simulation could be run to predict the battery charge level of the satellite for the first cycle. In summary, we have managed to fill the gaps of the simulation and hopefully get conservative, but reliable results.