Precision measurements of reaction wheel disturbances with frequency compensation process

The reaction wheel, an actuator for satellite attitude control, produces disturbance torque and force as well as axial control torque. The disturbances are so crucial to the pointing stability of this high precision satellite that a measurement of disturbances is necessary for such a satellite. The measurement table that is equipped with several load cells is one of the favorite types of measurement devices. The disturbance force and torque caused by the wheel's rotation, however, stimulate the elasticity of the loadcells from the measurement table and induce the vibration of the table. This then causes the measurement error, which is especially large near the resonance frequencies of the table. In order to reduce this type of error, a calibration process with frequency compensation is suggested in this paper. The “filtered” disturbance spectrum is obtained from the raw data and the degradation of data accuracy caused by the table vibration is alleviated. Since the exact measurement is made possible by this compensation process even in the resonance area, the measurement range can be expanded up to the frequency area including the resonance frequencies. The compensation method has been adopted for the HAU measurement table where three uni-directional loadcells are used. The validity of the use of uni-directional loadcells is also tested theoretically.