Design of a new refillable reservoir for a standard surface tension tank

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The standard Propellant Management Device (PMD) for a surface tension propellant tank for geostationary telecommunications satellites in the mass range above 2000kg (44091bm) consists of Propellant Acquisition Vanes (PAV) for liquid pumping and a so called Propellant Refillable Reservoir (PRR) [1] for the main AV maneuvers. In addition to the above, this new PMD can be used for other mission profiles, e.g. a Mars probe without any hardware modifications or even for much smaller satellites and thus with smaller tank sizes. The flexibility to use additional launchers that typically require the horizontal ground transportation of the propellant loaded satellite by rail or ship requests a loading profile that is normally in conflict with the onorbit requirements and in addition with practically no minimum fill level constraints from the tank side. Additionally, the spacecrafts tend to be larger and the main station-keeping maneuvers, on average, have longer burn times. The tank therefore has to provides a larger expulsion capacity. The design request for the new PMD was to modify the standard PRR without loosing the standard interface capability required by the larger satellites; i.e. the interfaces with the pressure vessel and the PAVs should be unchanged. The new capabilities were to be included without mass penalty and in parallel, production costs were to be reduced. Copyright 2000 the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics Inc. All rights reserved. The design feasibility, together with the fulfillment of the design requirements, has been demonstrated and is presented herein. The functional feasibility proof was established in cooperation with ZARM -Bremen (Center of Applied Space Technology and Microgravity) by using their existing Drop Tower. This allows experiments to be carried out in an excellent micro-g environment for a 4.6 second time duration.