Design of optimal thruster's configuration for attitude control

This paper presents a new method to design optimal thrusters’ configuration for geostationary satellite in order to reduce the fuel consumption and increase the control accuracy. The thrusters configuration generally contains information about thrusters fixed on the satellite body structure، including their location، orientation. One important factor playing a key role in thrusters’ configuration design is satellite force-torque analysis. The proposed configuration، however، should lead to fulfill specified attitude maneuver when the set of force and torque produced by satellite thruster system is adequate. For this purpose، two optimization methods using genetic algorithm (GA) and differential evolution (DE) has been applied to determine the optimal thrusters configuration on the communication satellite body. The cost function employed to minimize both the fuel consumption and error generated by thrusters installation and uncertainties. Moreover، this work allows applying some different constraints in the proposed formulation including minimization of the thruster plume impingement effect on the satellite outer structure and on the solar arrays and the second one is the satellite dimension and geometry. Simulation results show that DE outperforms GA in terms of accuracy and CPU time. Effectiveness of differential evolution algorithm is illustrated in the paper when compared with GA results.