A Dual-Redundancy Two-Phase Hybrid Stepping Motor for Satellite Antenna Drive System

Abstract

Stepping motors are highly preferred in spacecraft applications because of their simple structure, convenient control and lack of accumulated error. In satellite antenna drive systems, reliability and fault tolerance have been paid more and more attention. Accordingly, to enhance the reliability of the electrical system in the field of aerospace, the redundancy technology, which can effectively improve the system reliability while reducing the requirements of components, was applied in the design of hybrid stepping motors (HSM), a dual-redundancy two-phase HSM which has two sets of stator windings was designed in this paper. The mathematical model of stepping motor and the specific structure parameters of the motor are given. The torque-frequency characteristic was regarded as the key to measure the performance of the motor proposed in this paper. The results of 3-D finite element modeling are presented. The corresponding performance experiment on the designed motor was carried out and both the simulation results and the experimental results verified the validity and superiority of the dual redundancy HSM.