Body mounted germanium substrate solar cell arrays form the faces of many small satellite designs to provide the primary power source on orbit. High efficiency solar cells are made affordable for university satellite programs as triangular devices trimmed from wafer scale solar cells. The smaller cells allow array designs to pack tightly around antenna mounts and payload instruments, giving the board design flexibility. One objective of this work is to investigate the reliability of solar cells attached to FR-4 printed circuit boards. FR-4 circuit boards have significantly higher thermal expansion coefficients and lower thermal conductivities than germanium. This thermal expansion coefficient mismatch between the FR-4 board and the components causes concern for the power system in terms of failures seen by the solar cells. These failures are most likely to occur with a longer orbital lifetime and an extended exposure to harsh environments. This work compares various methods of attaching solar cells to printed circuit boards, using solder paste alone and with a silicone adhesive, and considering the application of these adhesives by comparing the solder joints when printed by screen versus a stencil. An environmental test plan was used to compare the survivability and performance of the solar arrays.

A photo-voltaic system consists of solar cells, power converters, battery and the load. The power converter interfaces the solar cells, battery and the load. The battery serves to equalise the energy demand (load) and the energy supply (solar cell). Currently the solar cells and the battery cost nearly 90% of the system cost. A typical photo-voltaic system can adopt various power bus configurations. Battery tied bus is the simplest of the power bus configurations. In this topology, the battery is always attached to the bus. This system is extremely simple in terms of power circuit configuration as well as control. Such systems weigh less and are more reliable. However, the battery tied bus suffers certain disadvantages. The first among them is the poor utilisation of solar panels. The load has to tolerate the full swing of the battery voltage variation. On account of the constraint on the solar panel voltage, the solar panels may not be loaded to the maximum power capacity. Such operating conditions lead to gross under-utilisation of the expensive solar panels. The battery tied bus configuration is designed, built and evaluated experimentally with 4 solar panels rated at 35 W each and a lead acid battery of 12 V 42 AH rating. This thesis explores alternate power architecture to overcome the above limitations. Load regulation and maximum power harvesting from the solar panels are the objectives. In the proposed configuration, a bidirectional power converter is inserted between the bus and the battery. The bidirectional power converter operates in boost mode and charges the battery when the sunlight is available. During eclipse period, it operates in buck mode and meets the load demand. The maximum power is extracted from the panels by controlling the voltage across the solar panels. The bus voltage reference is computed by MPPT block and the bus voltage is regulated to the reference voltage through closed loop control. So the maximum power is extracted from the panels at the expense of extra bidirectional power converter. Even though there is an additional power loss due to the introduction of power converter, this power bus configuration is superior because it increases the output power from the panel itself. The entire control logic implementation is done digitally using dspic30F6010A. The simulation is done by writing script files in C language. The proposed bus configuration is designed, built and evaluated experimentally with the same setup and the results are then compared.