Cold gas micro propulsion development for satellite application

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Micro spacecraft which have gained huge popularity in the last decade are termed as “CubeSat”, a well-known class of small satellites. The fast growing functionality and popularity of CubeSat has helped researchers to push the technology demonstration towards efficient performance and reliability needed for commercial and governmental applications. Keeping space debris and use of fossil fuels as propellant in mind, an attempt has been made to develop a green propellant to overcome the issues of space debris, toxicity of propellant and affordable propellant. All liquid propellant based propulsion requires liquid feed system and for that, uses pressurized gas (basically helium) to assist liquid to expel out of the tank. But once the liquid propellant is over, the pressurized gas is unutilized and system runs out of fuel. So the current work, apart from being used as normal cold gas propulsion, it also offers the advantage of using feed system unutilized gases in case of liquid fuel runs out. The present work focuses on cold gas micro thruster development, and its experimental testing in space and sea level condition at various pressure conditions. A computational fluid dynamics model for the same has been developed to validate its experimental results. The thrust value recorded between micro to milli Newton ranges to fulfil the requirements of attitude and station keeping for the CubeSat of 1 to 50 kg dry mass range. Thrust values of 0.8 mN at 1 bar pressure difference to 2.24 mN at 4 bar pressure difference were reported for vacuum environment testing. It’s almost just twice the value of thrust achieved in case of sea level for the corresponding pressure differences. Furthermore, the parameters like pressure, temperature, Mach number, velocity vector, specific impulse, nozzle efficiency etc. are studied and reported for 8 different cases of pressure difference ranging from 1 bar pressure difference to 4 bar pressure difference respectively in atmospheric and vacuum environment.