Design and diagnostics of arc-resistant electronics for satellite telecommunication systems

This paper proposes a modern theoretical approach for the complex diagnostics of on-board electronic equipment for the occurrence of primary electric arcing in satellite telecommunication systems. Our method is based on the gradual partitioning of an electronic device into regions that are potentially vulnerable to primary arcing. We solve the complete plasma physics problem with a parametric sweep for each vulnerable region as an independent computational plasma physics problem to obtain the critical parameter diagrams. Each diagram shows the most and least dangerous ranges of critical parameters with respect to the possibility of arcing in a spacecraft's operating conditions. A large set of two-/three-dimensional critical parameter diagrams is widely used for the complex diagnostics and development of electronic systems that are arc-resistance under various operating conditions.