Gravity Axis Alignment of Solar Panel Deployment Test Equipment Using Laser Tracker
Hong-Youl Moon, Sang‐Ho Park · Korean Journal of Computational Design and Engineering · 2018
In this paper, a gravity-axis alignment method is proposed for the deployment test whose equipment consists of a deployable solar panel, tape spring hinges, a deployment fixture, and a rotational structure with a zero-G device. If the deployment test equipment is not precisely aligned to the gravity axis, disturbances induced by its misalignment give critical impacts to the onground deployment test capability. In order to align the test equipment with the gravity axis, the exact gravity axis is identified prior to the alignment activity. We propose a method to align the laser tracker precisely to the gravity axis using an inclination sensor and achieve the alignment accuracy of laser tracker with 10SUP-4/SUP orders of magnitude in degree. If the exact gravity axis is acquired with the laser tracker, the deployment test equipment is aligned with the laser tracker. The proposed equipment has four compartments which are aligned and compensated with respect to the gravity axis; a deployment fixture, a rotation axis module, a horizontal shaft module, and the rotation axis of the solar panel. For each item, a new method for aligning with the gravity axis is proposed in this study. As a result, it is verified through test activities that the deployment test equipment is aligned with an accuracy with 10-3 orders of magnitude in degree.