Application of a Novel Current Sensor in the Reaction Flywheel Control

As the execution component of the satellite attitude control system, the reaction flywheel adjusts the attitude of the satellite by outputting a accurate control torque. Therefore the torque control accuracy of the flywheel motor is important for the control accuracy of the whole attitude control system. In this paper, the flywheel motor is a square-wave brushless DC motor, which is of simple structure and high reliability, but it has an inherent torque ripple from its operating principle. To resolve this problem, a novel current sensor and its corresponding inverter topology is adopted in this paper, which can detect winding currents in every operation state of the square-wave brushless DC motor with only one sensor, its effectiveness is verified by the experimental result.