• Bipod
• damping system
• electromagnetic shunt damper
• flexible joints
• frequency response characterization
• Hexapod
• high precision mechanisms
• lumped parameters model
• micro-vibration
• modal analysis
• Multibody dynamics
• Nastran
• Patran
• Simulink
• Surrey Space Centre
• University of Surrey

This master thesis is the result of a seven months’ research work carried out at the Surrey Space Centre in Guildford, United Kingdom. The work, performed along with the Spacecraft Structures and Mechanism group, has as main objective the dynamic characterization of a novel mechanism for spacecraft micro-vibration mitigation purposes. The thesis starts with a general discussion about the sources of micro-vibration on board satellite platforms and their capability to compromise the pointing of high precision payloads, then a general overview of the available isolating concepts is provided and one of them, developed at the Surrey Space Centre, the Electromagnetic Shunt Damper with negative resistance, is analysed in greater detail. The possibility to exploit this concept to isolate a sensitive payload along all the six degrees of freedom has been individuated in the Cubic hexapod, a mechanism which is composed of six identical struts, each one of them equipped with the damper. The first prototype of the strut is modelled by means of analytical and numerical tools, in a second phase two of them are assembled in a Bipod configuration. Once the model has been validated, the frequency response of the mechanism is analysed in great detail with different sets of boundary conditions and the main advantages and disadvantages are highlighted. In the end a couple of possible trade-off solutions between the different sets are presented forecasting a future optimization campaign.