Experimental and numerical analysis of reaction wheel disturbances

Abstract

Investigating disturbance properties of reaction wheels (RWs), a key component in attitude control system of spacecraft, is important for health monitoring of RWs, exploration of new RWs, designing attitude control systems, and so on. In this paper, we first present a recently developed disturbance detector and experiment results for practical RWs. The new detector enables detecting low-frequency disturbances, which was difficult for previous detectors. Next, we will describe dynamics simulation results. In this simulation, we investigate the effects of imperfections such as misalignment, sizing error, and mass imbalances.