Development Status and Way Forward of SITAEL’s Air-breathing Electric Propulsion Engine

Rarefied Flow Simulation of Conical Intake and Plasma Thruster for Very Low Earth Orbit Spaceflight

“…In the last decade, a number of intake concepts for air-breathing EP application were investigated by several research groups [10,[20][21][22][23][24]. Most of these concepts proposed compact intake geometries featuring an inlet composed of several elongated ducts having a circular, rectangular, or hexagonal section and act as a molecular trap for the collected flow, ideally increasing the collected particles residence time inside the propulsion system, hence the achievable intake compression.…”

“…In principle, an airbreathing system can be used both as primary or secondary propulsion, allowing to extend the mission at low altitudes prior to disposal. Recent air-breathing concept proposals include air-breathing ion engines [9], double stage Hall thrusters [10], and inductive plasma thrusters [11]. A recent review of all proposed technology concepts is provided in the study mentioned in reference [12].…”

“…Among them, the double stage Hall thruster concept was tested in conditions representative of VLEO air-breathing operation, but for a short time and with a Xefed hollow cathode. The thrust produced accounted for almost 25% of the drag experienced by the system [10]. The air-breathing EP technology comes with several criticalities mainly associated with system performance, lifetime, and integration into the satellite platform.…”

RF Helicon-based Inductive Plasma Thruster (IPT) Design for an Atmosphere-Breathing Electric Propulsion system (ABEP)

“…The intake features several coaxial cylinders connected by plates which form divisions of different AR between each cylinder delivering η c = 0.28 − 0.32. This has been tested in combination with a modified HET for ABEP operation and is the only ABEP system of intake and thruster in one device that has been tested for continuos operation, to date, in the laboratory [13][14][15][16][17]31]. The Lanzhou Institute of Space Technology and Physics [32], designed an active intake with a two stage system, a passive multi-hole plate followed by an active compression with a turbo pump system that can achieve η c = 0.42 − 0.58.…”

“…Precedent studies showed such degradation phenomena when operating conventional EP with atmospheric propellant, especially on accelerating grids in RF ion thrusters (RIT), and discharge channels in Hall-effect thrusters (HET) [9,10]. While many ABEP concepts have been investigated in the past based on RIT [9][10][11], HET [12][13][14][15][16][17], and RF plasma thruster [18], the only laboratory tested ABEP system to date is the RAM-HET that includes intake and HET into one device [14][15][16][17]. Results shows that the thruster unit needs further optimization to operate on atmospheric propellant as the thrust generated is still too low compared to the expected drag.…”