Design and Optimization of Air Core Magnetorquers for Attitude Control of LEO Nanosatellites

Magnetorquers are widely used electromagnetic actuators for attitude control of low-Earth orbit nanosatellites. Due to the limited power budget, strict volume and mass constraints of standard nanosatellite formats, the magnetorquers need to be carefully designed. An optimal magnetorquer exhibits the required magnetic dipole moment while minimizing the mass and power consumption. Here, a multiobjective optimization based on the genetic algorithm is adopted to design two air core magnetorquers. The presented approach allows a designer to set acceptable range of the design parameters, which makes it timeefficient, powerful, and versatile as it can be easily applied to different design cases. The preliminary resistance measurements of the two prototyped magnetorquers show excellent agreement with the calculations within 3%.