Research Projects

CubeSats are popular in academia and industry due to their lower budget and deployment time. The electric power system (EPS) is a key component in CubeSats, providing power to other equipment. Redundancy is crucial for the success of missions, but EPS failures are a major contributor. To improve reliability, redundancy can be provided for critical components like semiconductor devices and microcontrollers. However, size restrictions on printed circuit boards make this difficult. To overcome this, multiport converters with minimal inductors can be developed to reduce the EPS footprint. This approach uses freed-up space for redundant critical components to reduce failure rates. While some multiport converters have been proposed to reduce the converter footprint, they have lower efficiency compared to the state-of-the-art CubeSat EPS. This project aims to develop an efficient and compact multiport converter for CubeSat EPS, with a real system prototype developed for an 1U CubeSat and performance demonstrated under various operating conditions.