Design and Manufacturing a Laboratory Example of Pulsed Plasma Thruster

Although Pulsed Plasma Thruster (PPT) has first been utilized in a space mission in 1964 but after more than four decades, it is still a space rated technology which has performed various propulsion tasks from stationkeeping tasks 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, PPT is one of the promising electric propulsion devices for small satellites (e.g. CubeSats) as the following advantages: simplicity, lightweight, robustness, low power consumptions, low production costs and small dimensions. In spite of the fact that the issues relating to 􀈝PPT scaling have been investigated to a certain degree in recent years, it is felt that for an application on CubeSats this topic has to be investigated in greater detail for even smaller dimensions and better performance. Therefore a laboratory benchmark rectangular breech-fed pulsed plasma thruster (PPT) was designed, developed and successfully tested in a bell-type vacuum chamber at 10-6 mbar for the first time in west Asia (Iran). The PPT has been tested while the main capacitor, which is a 35 􀈝F, 2.5 kV oil-filled capacitor, has been charged with a wide range of voltage, ranging from 250 V to 1750 V making the system stored energy range from less than 1 J to 60 J, producing the impulse bit varying from 30 􀈝N-s to 1.3 mN-s. This work initiated a research program in Iran for working on PPTs and miniaturization of PPTs while increasing the performance parameters. The present paper reviews the PPT design and the development briefly.