New Power Conditioning System for Battery-free Satellite Buses with Maximum Power Point Tracking

The purpose of this paper is describe a new conception of Power Conditioning Unit (PCU) developed to fulfill the requirements of BepiColombo Electronic Propulsion module. This load bus has very tough specification especially regarding transient response during total load switch-off ("beam out") which has to be less than 2% of the bus voltage. The conception we propose, is the new Sequential Switching Shunt Maximum Power Regulator (S3MPR) consisting in a S3R, to keep the SA voltage at its Maximum Power Point (MPP) followed by a Boost regulator to produce a constant 100V to supply the Electronic Propulsion (EP). This concept may also be of interest for other future missions involving high power/high voltage power busses. The PCU has been verified by means of testing on a scaled-down Power Subsystem of 1kW output power.