Microplasma Jet Device For Plasma Thruster

Recently, nanosatellites (nanosats) electric propulsion systems have attracted attention to researchers due to very simple structure and low delivery cost1. However, present electric propulsion system, such as hall effect thruster, arcjets, and plasma thrusters, have low thrust, short lifetime, no flexibility2. Among various thruster systems, the plasma thruster has versatile advantages such as high specific impulse and small size for future nanosats. However, it is difficult to generate high thrust because the plasma, which is produced by conventional devices, has low energy. In addition, these conventional plasma thrusters also are difficult to change direction because these thrusters have limited flexibility. New solutions must be offered to space mission designers to overcome these limitations. Here, we have proposed the highly energetic intense coupled microplasma with a single bundle of three hollow-core optical fibers to obtain both the high thrust and flexibility. The proposed flexible microplasma thruster, which has a protruded optical-fiber, can generate the highly energetic intense coupled microplasma with a strong plasma emission and a high thrust. The detailed novel microplasma device, microplasma physics, discharge and thrust characteristics, currents, fluid simulation, high-speed intensified chargecoupled device (ICCD) images, and more detailed mechanism are studied and will be discussed in detail. This research contributes to better understanding on the novel structure and design of future microplasma thruster system by analyzing microplasma phenomena.