Using super-capacitor units in the power supply system of re-entry vehicle of a crew transportation spacecraft

The paper presents a configuration for the Power Supply System (PSS) of a Re-entry Vehicle (RV) of a Crew Transportation Spacecraft (CTS) based on expendable batteries and autonomous current sources specially designed to support electrical pulsed loads of CTS RV during descent. The paper reviews some special features of such a configuration. It present a CTS RV PSS option which has hybrid energy storage devices based on Li-ion storage battery and Super-Capacitor Units (SCU) packaged in a single housing. It present a CTS RV PSS option which has Li-ion storage batteries to support steady-state onboard loads and patch cables based on super-capacitors to support pulse loads (initiation of pyros of the CTS RV soft landing thrusters). Schematics have been developed for the patch cable with a super-capacitor unit (SCU-patch cable), which were used to refine its electrical parameters to take into account the highest pulsed load requirements for an RV by constructing a math model of the SCU-patch cable in MATLAB/Simulink and running a series of simulations. The paper presents simulation results drawing conclusions about the practicability of using such a device.