A Performance Comparison of Pulsed Plasma Thruster Electrode Configurations

Download or read book A Performance Comparison of Pulsed Plasma Thruster Electrode Configurations written by National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2018-08-09 with total page 28 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pulsed plasma thrusters are currently planned on two small satellite missions and proposed for a third. In these missions, the pulsed plasma thruster's unique characteristics will be used variously to provide propulsive attitude control, orbit raising, translation, and precision positioning. Pulsed plasma thrusters are attractive for small satellite applications because they are essentially stand alone devices which eliminate the need for toxic and/or distributed propellant systems. Pulsed plasma thrusters also operate at low power and over a wide power range without loss of performance. As part of the technical development required for the noted missions, an experimental program to optimize performance with respect to electrode configuration was undertaken. One of the planned missions will use pulsed plasma thrusters for orbit raising requiring relatively high thrust and previously tested configurations did not provide this. Also, higher capacitor energies were tested than previously tried for this mission. Multiple configurations were tested and a final configuration was selected for flight hardware development. This paper describes the results of the electrode optimization in detail. Arrington, Lynn A. and Haag, Tom W. and Pencil, Eric J. and Meckel, Nicole J. Glenn Research Center NASA/TM-97-206305, E-11002, NAS 1.15:206305, IEPC-97-127 NAS3-27186; RTOP 632-1B-1B...