An Approach to Generalizing Taylor Series Integration for Low-Thrust Trajectories

Master thesis (2017)

Authors

M.M.H.J. Van den Broeck Aerospace Engineering

Contributors

K.J. Cowan (supervisor 1)
P.N.A.M. Visser (supervisor 2)
D. Dirkx (supervisor 2)
P.P. Sundaramoorthy (supervisor 2)
Faculty
Aerospace Engineering
Copyright: © 2017 Michael Van den Broeck
Generalization Low-thrust trajectories Taylor Series Integration Unified State Model
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Published Date

20-07-2017

Language

English

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Faculty

Aerospace Engineering

Abstract

The use of Taylor Series Integration (TSI) for the propagation of spacecraft trajectories and its combination with the relatively unknown Unified State Model (USM) coordinate system, resulting in the TSI-USM propagator, is known to allow fast propagation of interplanetary low-thrust trajectories. Unfortunately, the TSI-USM propagator is a problem-specific method, which is detrimental for its use in evolutionary algorithms.

In this thesis, a method was developed to generalize the TSI-USM propagator. The TSI-USM was generalized to allow the propagation of a spacecraft trajectory in a central gravitational field subject to any pre-set thrust profile, without the need to adapt the internal working of the propagator. The three-dimensional thrust profile should be specified a priori, and with respect to time, by the user or by an evolutionary algorithm. The method used to generalize the TSI-USM requires the coefficients of the cubic spline interpolation of the pre-set thrust profile to compute the recurrence relations of the TSI-USM.

Results show that, although the method indeed generalizes the TSI-USM, it is less accurate and requires more CPU time for a given accuracy than existing RK8(7)13M-based propagators. From this result, it can be expected that future attempts to generalize the TSI-USM propagator, without sacrificing its accuracy and computational speed, will be challenging.