A Comparative Study of MPPTs for Nano-Satellite Microgrid Applications under Spinning Flight Scenarios.

This paper offers a comparative analysis of Maximum Power Point Tracking (MPPTs) techniques under the spinning conditions for small satellite applications. The Nano Satellite (NanoSat) is constrained on volume and mass with body-mounted solar panels and where it is dedicated to some special orientation scenarios, depending on specific mission requirements. This results in irregular solar irradiance on the PV system; thus, it needs an efficient and effective strategy to extract the maximum power transferred to the loads in the NanoSat Electrical Power System (EPS). While the EPS can be regarded a space microgrid due to control and coordination in a small electric network of distributed generations (DGs), storage, and loads. Therefore, some well-known MPPT techniques are investigated where different scenarios are carried out among conventional Perturb and Observe (P&O), Incremental Conductance (IC), and Ripple Correlation Control (RCC) to highlight the optimal MPPT extractions for NanoSat applications. The system was developed and modeled in MATLAB/SIMULINK and the final findings demonstrate that the RCC provides smooth power compared to other ones, while the other ones offer an oscillated power under the effect of radiations change and spinning conditions for the system under test.