Switching delayed feedback control for an electrodynamic tether system in an inclined elliptic orbit

The chaotic librational motion of a tether system in elliptic orbit has been studied and controlled by delayed feedback control up to date. Contrary to the past literatures that addressed the periodic stability of tether systems, this paper studies the local stability of in-plane/out-of-plane motion of electrodynamic tether (EDT) systems in elliptic orbits with respect to the true anomaly. From the viewpoint of the local stability of tether systems, in this paper, provided that the electric current is used only for controlling the librational motion, a new simple delayed feedback control, named “switching delayed-feedback control (SDFC)” is proposed, which combines a delayed-feedback control (DFC) and variable structure system (VSS) concept. The effectiveness of the proposed method to stabilize the librational in-plane/out-of-plane periodic motion of an electrodynamic tether system in an inclined elliptic orbit with high eccentricity was demonstrated, and compared with that of the traditional delayed-feedback controllers by numerical simulations.