Nanosatellite Design Considerations for a Mission to Explore the Propellant Sloshing Problem

Sloshing Platform for In-Orbit Controller Experimentation is an ambitious, student run mission to design and fly a cubesat to study fluid sloshing in spacecraft. The project will examine zero-g propellant sloshing from an experimental standpoint. Despite the small size and limited payload capacity, we intend to use the cubesat platform to mimic larger spacecraft and implement novel detection and computer vision methods in our analysis. Many modern spacecraft rely on propellant-filled tanks to perform attitude control and station-keeping maneuvers. When a large percentage of the spacecraft’s mass is comprised of liquid propellant, sloshing becomes a critical aspect of spacecraft attitude control and stability. The mission will study the tank/fluid dynamics using new methods to gain an enhanced understanding of low-gravity fluid disturbance effects and improve simulations using equivalent mechanical models (EMMs). Active control of the fluid leading to the reduction of propellant slosh settling times will improve the maneuverability and performance of spacecraft. This paper will focus on satellite payload research and design requirements used to inform other aspects of the SPICEsat design. In this paper, mission objectives will be discussed, numerical simulations for the proposed control algorithms are demonstrated, and a satellite experiment design is presented. Finally, we examine computational fluid dynamics models to validate the satellite design and propellant sensing components of the proposed spacecraft.