Electrical power
The UPMSat-2 power generation and management system consists of:
Battery
The UPMSat-2 battery is built by Saft Batteries. This is a battery composed of 24 VES 16 Lithium-Ion cells, in a 4-series configuration (6 cells each) connected in parallel. The battery has a capacity of 18 A h and is designed for a useful life of 12 years.
The battery was officially received by Prof. Pindado and Prof. Cubas at the Saft Batteries factory (Poitiers, France) in 2013. After that, the battery was transported to the facilities of the IDR/UPM Institute in Montegancedo (Madrid). From here on, a long process of battery maintenance began, which included weekly monitoring of the total voltage of the battery and of each cell, to measure the imbalance in each series. When the voltage imbalance between two cells in the series with the highest value exceeded a certain threshold, the battery managers carried out a balancing process according to the procedures established by Saft Batteries. This process lasted three full days.
The maintenance work on the UPMSat-2 battery has led to intense academic collaboration between The maintenance work on the UPMSat-2 battery has led to intense academic collaboration between professors and students of the ETSIAE, in the degrees of the Degree in Aerospace Engineering and the Master’s Degree in Space Systems. In this sense, the Final Degree Projects (TFG) of Mario Argüelles Pastur, Mario Andrades Márquez, Eduardo Andrés Endériz, Ángel Porras Hermoso, and the Final Master’s Projects (TFM) of Jorge García Aldea and Juan Antonio Zaragoza Asensio can be highlighted.
In addition, this technical effort has been reflected in teaching publications, and in the development of a new analytical model of battery behavior.
