Abstract
An artificial satellite which has a magnetically suspended momentum wheel is expected to have high reliability and accurate attitude-control-performance. This type of wheel can also be used as an actuator in directions transverse to its spin axis, by controlling the tilt angle of the wheel rotor actively. So the three-axis control of a satellite is possible with a single wheel.
However, the small stiffness of magnetic bearings can cause the instability of the satellite-wheel system and make the nutation of the satellite grow.
In this paper, a new feedback control method is proposed to stabilize the nutation of a satellite. That is, the nutation of the satellite is detected by measuring the control torque of the magnetic bearing, and the control torque is added to the gimbal command through a low pass filter.
The effectiveness of the proposed method is verified analytically by using Routh row and confirmed by the computer simulation.
