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Design Principles And Preliminary Testing Of A Micropropulsion Electrospray Thruster Research Platform, Will Alan Mcgehee
Design Principles And Preliminary Testing Of A Micropropulsion Electrospray Thruster Research Platform, Will Alan Mcgehee
Master's Theses
The need for micropropulsion solutions for spacecraft has been steadily increasing as scientific payloads require higher accuracy maneuvers and as the use of small form-factor spacecraft such as CubeSats becomes more common. Of the technologies used for this purpose, electrospray thrusters offer performance that make them an ideal choice. Electrosprays offer high accuracy impulse bits at low power and high efficiency, and have low volume requirements. Design choice reasoning and preliminary testing results are presented for two electrospray thruster designs. The first thruster, named the Demonstration thruster, is operated in atmospheric conditions and serves as a highly visible example of …
A Homegrown Dsmc-Pic Model For Electric Propulsion, Dominic Charles Lunde
A Homegrown Dsmc-Pic Model For Electric Propulsion, Dominic Charles Lunde
Master's Theses
Powering spacecraft with electric propulsion is becoming more common, especially in CubeSat-class satellites. On account of the risk of spacecraft interactions, it is important to have robust analysis and modeling tools of electric propulsion engines, particularly of the plasma plume. The Navier-Stokes equations used in classic continuum computational fluid dynamics do not apply to the rarefied plasma, and therefore another method must be used to model the flow. A good solution is to use the DSMC method, which uses a combination of particle modeling and statistical methods for modeling the simulated molecules. A DSMC simulation known as SINATRA has been …