The study of spin control of flexible electric sail using the absolute nodal coordinate formulation

The electric sail(E-sail) is an advanced propellantless propulsion system that uses the virtual sail produced by a group of long centrifugally spanned and electrically charged tethers to extract the solar wind momentum to spacecraft thrust. In this paper, the absolute nodal coordinate formulation (ANCF) is applied to obtain a dynamic model of the tether using cable element based on the constitutive model of flexible tether considering the axial and bending deformation. The research applied the voltage modulation of the tether to obtain the attitude control torque for the sail. This study presented a method which used equivalent coning angle and phase angle to control the attitude of the sail concerning the deformation of the tether. The results shows E-sail which is consist of long flexible tethers could be well controlled by using the equivalent parameters.

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