Design and analysis of power system architectures for small spacecraft

This paper presents an evaluation approach of power system architectures for small spacecraft. Five power system architectures for small spacecraft application are used for purposes of testing the proposed approach. The performance analysis of five spacecraft architectures is conducted based on energy requirements, mass, and reliability. The most economical architecture should have lower mass, energy and higher reliability. In arriving at the most economical architecture, the approach of normalization is used to convert energy, mass and unreliability into the values between 0 and 1, respectively. The architectures are ranked according to the sum of these values with some specified weights.