Design, Development and Operation of a Laboratory Pulsed Plasma Thruster for the First Time in West Asia

Abstract

Although the pulsed plasma thruster (PPT) was first utilized on a space mission in 1964, after more than four decades, it is still a space-rated technology which has performed various propulsion tasks, from station-keeping to three-axis attitude control for a variety of former missions. With respect to the rapid growth in the small satellite community and the growing interest for smaller satellites in recent years, the PPT is one of the promising electric propulsion devices for small satellites (e.g., CubeSats) due to the following advantages: simplicity, lightweight, robustness, low power consumption, low production cost and small dimensions. Therefore, a laboratory benchmark rectangular breech-fed pulsed plasma thruster using a self-inductor as a coupling element was designed, developed and successfully tested in a bell-type vacuum chamber at 10-4 Pa for the first time in west Asia (Iran). The PPT has been tested using a 35 μF, 2.5 kV oil-filled capacitor, producing an impulse bit varying from 300 μN-s to 1.3 mN-s at a maximum specific impulse of 1100 s. As a result a research program in Iran was initiated for working on PPTs and the miniaturization of PPTs while increasing the performance parameters. The present paper briefly reviews the PPT design and development.