Low-Power Constant Current Driver for Stepper Motors in Aerospace Applications

Stepper motors are used in satellites for various drive operations that are achieved by custom designs. This paper presents a stepper motor driver for satellite systems. It takes rotor position and phase current as inputs and employs a current subdivision method with back-propagation neural network (BPNN) to achieve constant current control of the motor. The driver can ensure the smooth operation and the positioning accuracy of the motor with a filter wheel that is 0.1944 kg·m2 in the moment of inertia and satisfy self-adaption of the load without system parameter identification. Compared to the previous scheme, the proposed scheme can reduce the power consumption by about 21.15% when the motor runs at 2 r/s, which is beneficial to the reduction in the size and the mass of some power supply modules. The performances of the developed driver are implemented on a field programmable gate array (FPGA) circuit board. The experimental results are conducted to verify the claims presented. The proposed scheme can be extended to other stepper motor systems with large moment of inertia loads within spacecraft.