Low Power Ablative Pulsed Plasma Thrusters

Ablative Pulsed Plasma Thrusters (APPTs) were the rst Electric Propulsion (EP) devices to be own onboard a real spacecraft and until nowadays continue to be among the most reliable thrusters to be used as main or secondary propulsion system, in small scale space missions. The down side is that their physics presents great complexity and it is not a trivial job to have precise physical models that can forecast the performance or characteristics of APPTs. Thus, much work has been done in order to characterize the general behavior of APPTs and to establish semi-empirical laws that could help the design process of such thrusters. Notwithstanding these eorts, the semi-empirical laws have not achieved perfect success in matching the forecasts with the experimental data, especially in the low-power regime of operation (below 10 J). Thereby, taking into account the recent eorts by the community to improve these semi-empirical models and to present general reviews of data, this paper aims to present a novel approach to the interpretation of experimental data of APPTs in the low-power regime. Special attention will be given to the coaxial conguration, which seems especially promising at low discharge energies. The aim is to develop a new set of formulas that will be useful for the design of high- eciency congurations for low-power APPT propulsion systems, which are going to nd increasingly wider application in the growing market of micro, nano and pico-satellites.

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