Vibration Reduction for Small Satellites

The Aerospace Corporation

Mentors: Wei Cai (Stanford), James Tuck-Lee (Aerospace Corporation), Jacob Rome (Aerospace Corporation), and Erik C. Mellquist (Aerospace Corporation)

Goal:

To design an additively-manufactured negative stiffness spring system that can be used to isolate small satellites from launch vibrations.

Problem:

Small satellites are able to “ride share” on larger satellite launches, but the vibration environment is usually unknown due to last minute changes. A negative stiffness mechanism is a system that uses a high stiffness spring and a preload to isolate vibration with high damping. Typically this system involves a few different components that are assembled together, but additive manufacturing can allow something like this to be made as one single part. The team was tasked with using these systems and technologies to design a vibration isolator that is effective in the range of 5-50Hz that can also withstand a loading of 8g’s that would be expected during satellite launches.

What did the team do?

The team started off with research to understand the key concept of “transmissibility” and simple simulations in order to learn how to obtain the transmissibility of a structure in Abaqus. The next step was to understand the negative stiffness mechanism in greater detail and develop a physical, single component AM structure that emulated it. Then the team followed a trial and error procedure to look at the behavior of different structures and compared them with the design requirements. The final solution was able to meet the requirement of having a natural frequency of less than 5 Hz, but ran into issues with surviving the launch loading conditions. Some recommendations of future work to address this issue were made that include redesigning the beams that the preload is applied to.