Power electronics

The power for space

Empowering space missions

Airbus Crisa’s power electronic units play a key role in reliable single-failure tolerant management of spacecraft energy sources while providing power distribution protection for the platform and its onboard payload equipment.

During the past two decades, numerous spacecraft have been equipped with Airbus Crisa’s power conditioning units, covering a wide variety of mission scenarios for Earth observation, space science, telecommunications and interplanetary missions.

Power management and distribution

Energy conversion

Airbus Crisa has a highly successful track record in power conversion and distribution, covering a range of regulated and unregulated primary/secondary power buses from 28 V to 120 V, with power levels higher than 20 kW.

Within its product portfolio covering the requirements of any state-of-the-art spacecraft, Airbus Crisa provides battery charge and discharge regulators, battery management systems, solar array regulators for both direct energy transfer or maximum power point tracking, secondary power conversion, switched and protected power distribution, heater control and reliable deployment chains.

^{Image: Power Control and Distribution Unit - BepiColombo}

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Power Processing Unit for Gridded Ion Technology

Electric propulsion

Ion thrusters

Airbus Crisa’s extensive experience in the design and development of electric propulsion power processing units covers the range of gridded ion thrusters from 700 V to 2.2 kV, backed by flight-proven high-voltage technology.

Cutting-edge power processing technology from Airbus Crisa delivers up to 6 kW to all power supplies required for thruster operation, including neutralizer, station-keeping, ignition, radio frequency generation and flow control. Thruster control, fault and parameter configuration are provided as well.

As a result of Airbus Crisa’s modular approach, its power processing units are easily adaptable to the spacecraft’s electrical propulsion system needs.

^{Image: Power Processing Unit for Telecom Platform}

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Power for active antenna

Distributed systems

Airbus Crisa is one of the leading developers of centralized power supply units for DC power solutions with active antennas.

Its unique centralized power and distribution solutions enable hundreds of amplifiers to be supplied via protecting elements with clean DC power – meeting the most demanding RF performance requirements.

With Airbus Crisa’s modular approach, centralized power supply units can cover a wide output power range from 1 kW to more than 10 kW, and are capable of being powered directly from the platform power bus.

^{Image: Active Antenna Electronics - Quantum}

Power subsystems

Integrated solutions

In addition to equipment design and manufacturing activities, Airbus Crisa has been developing the required skills to manage activities at higher integration levels. These capabilities have been achieved both, through participation/collocation with satellite systems core teams as well as with projects for which specific subsystems responsibility have been followed by qualified system engineers certified in the Airbus SEQ program.

Main system level activities achieved by Airbus Crisa are:

Leading stakeholders co-engineering phases
System level architecture and breakdown decomposition
System and subsystem analysis and trade-offs
Requirement management
Project management and subcontractors follow-up

^{Image: Electric Power Subsystem - JUICE}