Spacecraft Propulsion

This was a short duration design/build/test project that I did to evaluate a confined combustion reaction control thruster idea that I had been thinking about for a few years.  I designed the thruster for single discharge combustion using a burst disk and pre-charged fuel oxidizer in the chamber.  I triggered ignition using a custom high current bridge-wire igniter.  I fired the thruster dozens of times using a matrix of different fuels.  I tested the thruster in a vacuum chamber with different ambient pressure to evaluate nozzle geometry under different conditions.

I designed and built this Hall-effect thruster to test the feasibility of a very simple micro electric thruster.  I fueled the thruster with Argon using a long capillary tube as a flow regulator. The thruster was a compact design using a radial array of stacked rare earth magnets and a remote high voltage laser power supply. I balanced the system electric potential by making an electron emitting cathode from a heated tungsten wire in a ceramic guide tube. I tested the thruster for a total of several hours of run time in a custom vacuum chamber that I fabricated for thruster testing.   

This was a short duration design/build/test project that I did to evaluate an improved version of my previous Deflagration Thruster project.  For this project, I fabricated a new thruster assembly, but schematically, I replaced the burst disk assembly in the Deflagration Thruster with an automatically resetting mechanical popped valve that allowed the thruster to fire in quick succession and even automatically fire at a set frequency. I triggered ignition using a custom high voltage igniter.  I fired the thruster dozens of times using a matrix of different fuels.  I tested the thruster in a vacuum chamber with different ambient pressure to evaluate nozzle geometry under different conditions.

This was a very simple micro phase-change resistojet thruster that I designed and fabricated to primarily evaluate my thruster vacuum test setup with different area ratio thruster nozzles.  The thruster heated the propellent using a low voltage glow plug and was fueled with small quantities of water. I tested the thruster for several hours under different propellent flowrates and chamber vacuum levels.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

This was a vacuum test chamber that I designed and built to facilitate testing small thrusters under vacuum conditions.

This was a very short duration design/build/test to test the thermal value of decomposing nitrous oxide in a catalyst as a potential mono-fuel thruster propellent.  I heated incoming nitrous oxide using a resistance heater and then passed the heated gas through an insulated platinum ceramic catalyst.  Thermal conditions were measured on each side of the chamber to quantify the energy that was released during the nitrous oxide decomposition.  The heating contribution of the instrumented resistance element was double checked by running back-to-back non-decomposition test runs using carbon dioxide in place of the nitrous oxide.  Thrust was not measured, and the nozzle assembly was primarily incorporated to provide chamber backpressure.