Study on Micro Liquid-Propellant Thruster for Miniaturized Aerospace Systems

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In order to control the position and attitude of micro aerospace systems represented by the pico satellite of less than 1kg, liquid-propellent microthrusters are fabricated and tested. At first, two fuel supply systems are developed, one of which is a novel micro tank array and the other is piezoelectric diaphragm pump. All systems are based on MEMS technology especially, considering the microscale fluid and thermal phenomena. Because the size is extremely reduced, the increased surface/volume ratio makes the two-phase flow critically dependent on the wettability. In order to control the bubbly flow, super-hydrophobic surface is successfully obtained by electrochemical etching of silicon substrate. The obtained porous surface is found applicable to catalyst bed. Platinum particle is deposited there and compared its performance with the film configurations. Though the obtained ISP is not so high because of the low concentration of Hydrogen peroxide fuel, it can be concluded that the MEMS fabrication process for high-performance liquid-propellant thruster is achieved in this development study.