Powersphere Power System demonstration station

The PowerSphere Power System, and in particular, its power management and distribution (PMAD) architecture was conceived to be a solution to provide adequate power for micro-satellite and nano-satellite spacecrafts. The PowerSphere Power System, which was introduced at the 1999 IECEC in the Aerospace Power Management Session, is a means to deploy a large area of thin film solar cells with minimum weight on a sphere that requires no pointing and that can be sized for various desired power levels. This paper reports on the PMAD architecture for the electrical property characterization of a typical DC-DC converter chosen for the PowerSphere Power System. The solar array portion of the development station consists of a combination of 32 pentagonal and hexagonal shaped thin-film amorphous silicon solar cells mounted on an aluminum buckyball sphere approximately two feet in diameter. The buckyball sphere is mounted on a motorized drive mechanism to provide some degree of rotational movement, limited only by the wiring harness. The solar cells are electrically connected in pairs so those on opposite faces feed an individual integrated circuit DC-DC converter unit.