Thrust Density in Porous Electrospray Thrusters
Name
IEPC-2025-015.pdf
Size
6.17 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
7dc8f27f8938f512c317ddc4d2c469db
Author(s)
Corrado, Matthew N.
Lozano, Paulo C.
Date Issued
September 2025
Publisher
Electric Rocket Propulsion Society
Citation
Corrado, Matthew N. and Lozano, Paulo C. 2025. "Thrust Density in Porous Electrospray Thrusters."
Version
Final published version
Abstract
A path for increasing thrust density in electrospray thrusters is through fabrication of
denser arrays of emitters. Conventional arguments assume thrust to scale linearly with the
emitter number, but there has not been a critical analysis to examine the behavior of this
trend at very high densities. Here, we describe a model for thruster current as a function
of array density which considers how hydraulic losses change as density increases, and we
find that the ideal scaling is a poor approximation. In the optimistic cases, the current
increases monotonically with density but with diminishing returns. In the worst cases,
packing more emitters into the same space is detrimental as hydraulic losses dominate over
gains in the number of emitters. Under certain conditions there is an optimum density
which maximizes the net output. We also describe the fabrication and testing of a family
of porous electrospray emitters featuring pore sizes in the 10 nm to 100 nm range, with
the purpose of leveraging the high precision and uniformity afforded by these materials
to develop a platform suitable for experimentally validating the density models. A set
of test results from two of these thrusters is presented, both having a 450 µm pitch but
with different pore sizes. The 100 nm pore thruster shows characteristics similar to other
porous electrosprays, emitting in the pure-ion mode at currents up to 400 µA and exhibiting
current-temperature behavior commensurate with the liquid viscosity. The 10 nm pore
thruster appears to be greatly flow-restricted, producing about an order of magnitude less
current at analogous conditions and showing negligible response to changes in temperature.
Description
39th International Electric Propulsion Conference, Imperial College London, London, United Kingdom 14-19 September 2025
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike
Persistent DSpace Link
