A Numerical Methodology for the Prediction of the Near-Field Parasitic Electromagnetic Emissions of Solar Panels

This paper presents a methodology that is developed to assess the parasitic electromagnetic (EM) emissions of a satellite solar panel from a quasi-static to several tens of megahertz bandwidth. In the method, the solar panel is first modeled as an equivalent electric circuit, which allows the computation of the current distribution in all the elements using Spice-like software. The model is then converted into a network of electric dipoles, which permits to calculate the total EM emissions of the solar panel at a given point by the vectorial summation of the EM emissions due to each electric dipole. Thus, only the dipolar moment and the position and the orientation of each electric dipole are required. Encouraging experimental validations performed on a prototype solar panel are presented to illustrate the efficiency and the accuracy of the method. The method described in this paper is considered as a first step required in order to prepare wider applications on real satellites in the near future.