Mitigation of Misalignment Errors Over Inter-Satellite FSO Energy Harvesting

TL;DR

This study investigates how acquisition, tracking, and pointing (ATP) modules improve energy harvesting in inter-satellite free-space optical systems, showing that ATP extends effective harvesting distances significantly.

Contribution

It models misalignment errors and demonstrates that ATP mechanisms substantially increase the maximum inter-satellite distances for effective energy harvesting.

Findings

ATP extends harvesting distance from 680 km to 1500 km.

Average harvested power reaches 2 W at 750 km with 27 W transmit power.

Without ATP, minimum power requirements are not met beyond certain distances.

Abstract

In this paper, the impact of the acquisition, tracking, and pointing (ATP) module utilization on inter-satellite energy harvesting is investigated for 1U (0.1$\times$0.1$\times$0.1 m) and 12U (0.2$\times$0.2$\times$0.3 m) satellites for adaptive beam divergence and the corresponding distances while maintaining the spot diameters. Random elevation and azimuth misalignment error angles at both the transmitter and the receiver are modeled with Gaussian distribution hence the radial pointing error angle is modeled with Rayleigh distribution. The Monte Carlo approach is used to determine mean radial error angles for both transmitter and receiver in the non-ATP and ATP cases. The average harvested powers are analyzed as a function of the transmit powers and inter-satellite distances for both 1U and 12U satellites while considering the minimum power requirements. Our simulation results show that in the non-ATP case, the minimum required average harvested power cannot be achieved beyond 680 and 1360 km distances for 1U and 12U satellites, respectively, with a maximum transmit power of 1 kW. However, 2 W of average harvested power can be achieved at around 750 and 1500 km for 1U and 12U satellites, respectively, with a transmit power of 27 W in the presence of an ATP mechanism.