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The natural frequency of satellite structures must be made adjustable to ensure that they differ substantially from the dominant frequency of launch vehicles, and thereby avoid satellite damage arising from the phenomenon of resonance during launch. However, the means of achieving a maximum change in the natural frequencies of satellite structures at the lowest weight cost are poorly developed. The present study addresses this issue by proposing a lightweight implementation scheme based on structural stiffness for adjusting the natural frequencies of hexagonal prism satellite structures. Through finite element analysis and experimental analysis, the feasibility of the scheme is verified. The obtained results demonstrate that the proposed parameterized design scheme involving satellite stiffness is both rational and feasible.

CubeSats applications are recently advanced from purely education tools to actual scientific missions. To meet the high requirements of such scientific missions, the nonlinear deployment dynamics and the initial separation angular velocity from the deployer are required to be investigated and estimated. In this paper, the deployment process is described by single-degree-of-freedom (SDOF) and three-degree-of-freedom (TDOF) vibro-impact models for different deployment stages, and the evolution process from doubling bifurcation to chaos is visualized by the Poincare section and global bifurcation graph. According to the simulation results, reasonable initial separation angular velocities are consequently estimated. Simultaneously, the largest ratio of the excitation frequency and the natural frequency of the satellite in the deployer is found, which guides the design of CubeSat deployer.