Energy-Based Current Control for Stabilizing a Flexible Electrodynamic Tether System

An energy-based controller of electric current is synthesized for the libration stabilization of an electrodynamic tether system, which consists of a relatively large main-satellite and a sub-satellite of much smaller size. Two dynamic models with different levels of accuracy are considered in this work. First, a dumbbell model of the system is used for the controller design, which aims at damping injection on the libration motions via the real-time regulation of the electric current. Furthermore, the efficacy and performance of the proposed scheme are numerically verified by using a more complex multi-body model which accounts for not only the tether flexibility but also the attitude of the main-satellite.