Modeling and Analysis of Flexible Solar Sail

The paper presents a nonlinear dynamic model of flexible solar sail with elastic deformation and a stability analysis of the zero dynamics of model. Mathematical model based on the combination of hybrid coordinate method and the finite element method is used, to include the behavior of the vibration dynamics coupled to the solar sail. With both analytical and numerical results, it is shown that in the presence of elastic deformation, the zero dynamics of the coupled attitude-vibration model is stable only on the local compact set at its equilibrium point. This study demonstrates that the elastic deformation has a great impact on the state of the system, which needed to be considered in the design of controller. Then, a simple controller based on the backstepping method is proposed to complete the attitude maneuver of solar sail. A numerical simulation is used to verify the effectiveness of the controller.