Coulomb propulsion has been proposed for spacecraft cluster applications with separation distances on the order of dozens of meters. This thesis presents an investigation of analytic charge solutions for a planar and ...
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Coulomb propulsion has been proposed for spacecraft cluster applications with separation distances on the order of dozens of meters. This thesis presents an investigation of analytic charge solutions for a planar and three dimensional four satellite formations. The solutions are formulated in terms of the formation geometry. In contrast to the two and three spacecraft Coulomb formations, a four spacecraft formation has additional constraints that need to be satisfied for the individual charges on the spacecraft to be unique and real. A spacecraft must not only satisfy the previously developed inequality constraints to yield a real charge solution, but it must also satisfy three additional equality constraints to ensure the spacecraft charge is unique. Further, a method is presented to reduce the number of equality constraints arising due the dynamics of a four spacecraft formation. Formation geometries are explored to determine the feasibility of orienting a square formation arbitrarily in any given plane. The unique and real spacecraft charges are determined as functions of the orientation of the square formation in a given principal orbit plane. For a three-dimensional tetrahedron formation, the charge products obtained are a unique set of solution. The full three-dimensional rotation of a tetrahedron is reduced to a two angle rotation for simpler analysis. The number of equality constraints for unique spacecraft charges can not be reduced for a three-dimensional formation. The two angle rotation results are presented for different values of the third angle. The thesis also presents the set up for a co-linear four-craft problem. The solution for the co-linear formation is not developed. The discussion of co-linear formations serves as an open question on how to determine analytic solutions for system with null-space dimension greater than 1. The thesis also presents a numerical tool for determining potential shapes of a static Coulomb formation as a support to
All over the world, human resources are used on all kinds of different scheduling problems, many of which are time-consuming and tedious. Scheduling tools are thus very welcome. This paper presents a research project,...
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