High Performance, Electrically-Assisted Ionic Monopropellant Thruster

Physical Sciences Inc. proposes to develop a unique ionic monopropellant thruster for next generation DACS that uses an electrically-assisted ignition technique to generate rapid thrust impulses with short ignition delay times. The thruster will produce these short delay times with low power consumption using a novel monopropellant decomposition strategy and a high performance electrode arrangement. The ignition technique is particularly suited for thrusters on vehicles with volume- and power-limited envelopes. In Phase I, we demonstrated the technology in 3 lbf thruster firings having a duration of more than 2 seconds. In Phase II, we will scale-up the Phase I design to 25 lbf to show that low power consumption is feasible for a wide range of thrust requirements, and that the materials selected can survive the high-temperature, corrosive conditions of high duty cycle operations. Upon successful technology development under the SBIR program, full-scale protoflight systems and SM-3 DACS systems will be developed in technology transition programs.