A miniature electrospray thruster for precise attitude control of a nanosatellite

Ma, Chengyu and Ryan, Charlie (2018) A miniature electrospray thruster for precise attitude control of a nanosatellite. In Dynamics and Control of Space Systems. vol. 165, Univelt, Inc. pp. 893-912 .

Abstract

This paper introduces a miniature electrospray thruster, and investigates its feasibility of working as an attitude control actuator on CubeSat. The miniature thruster has a conically-shaped porous glass emitter, a porous nickel propellant reservoir and a 3D printed thruster casing. The propellant is passively fed through the porous structures using capillary action, resulting in a pressure-free and highly-compact thruster. The size of the thruster is approximately 1 × 1 × 2 cm with a total mass less than 10 g excluding a power control system. The thruster was tested in a vacuum chamber at the University of Southampton. Its thrust varied from 0.1 μN at ±2,600 V to 3 μN at ±2,900 V with a specific impulse higher than 6,800 s with a maximum power of 0.14 W. Based on the thruster specifications and test results, a hypothetical Earth-pointing 3 U CubeSat at a sun-synchronous orbit with an altitude of 500 km was used to analyse the attitude control and orbit maintenance performance of this miniature electrospray thruster. This analytical attitude and orbit control system uses a 16- thruster-configuration and a pulse-width-pulse-frequency modulation. Major orbital disturbances, including atmospheric drag, solar radiation pressure, magnetic field torques and gravity gradients, were considered in the analysis. This study suggests that the miniature electrospray thruster can enable precise attitude control with an accuracy of less than to 0.1 degree and orbit maintenance lifetime of about 6 years for a 3 U CubeSat at a 500 km altitude.

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