Time-varying modal parameters identification of a spacecraft with rotating flexible appendage by recursive algorithm

• The rotation of the large flexible appendage of spacecraft is considered.
• The time-varying modal parameters of this spacecraft structure are identified.
• Apply recursive algorithm without SVD to determine the time-varying modal parameters.
• The recursive algorithm has faster computational speed than common SVD-based methods.
• The wavelet de-noising is employed to improve identification precision for lower SNR.

The rotation of spacecraft flexible appendage may cause changes in modal parameters. For this time-varying system, the computation cost of the frequently-used singular value decomposition (SVD) identification method is high. Some control problems, such as the self-adaptive control, need the latest modal parameters to update the controller parameters in time. In this paper, the projection approximation subspace tracking (PAST) recursive algorithm is applied as an alternative method to identify the time-varying modal parameters. This method avoids the SVD by signal subspace projection and improves the computational efficiency. To verify the ability of this recursive algorithm in spacecraft modal parameters identification, a spacecraft model with rapid rotational appendage, Soil Moisture Active/Passive (SMAP) satellite, is established, and the time-varying modal parameters of the satellite are identified recursively by designing the input and output signals. The results illustrate that this recursive algorithm can obtain the modal parameters in the high signal noise ratio (SNR) and it has better computational efficiency than the SVD method. Moreover, to improve the identification precision of this recursive algorithm in the low SNR, the wavelet de-noising technology is used to decrease the effect of noises.