Design and Fabrication of Ionic Liquid Electrospray Thruster with Two-Stage Electrodes

Abstract

An ionic liquid electrospray thruster (ILEST) is expected as a propulsion system to control nano-spacecraft attitude and orbit in space. To produce high thrust, we propose a two-stage electrodes thruster which has an accelerator in addition to an extractor. We fabricated emitters on a silicon wafer and the two-stage electrodes on a glass substrate with through holes using microfabrication technologies. We confirmed that the fabricated ILEST emitted ions or droplets from the silicon emitters at near 2.0 kV. The maximum current in single-stage operation was -570 µA at 3.0 kV. With two-stage operation using the accelerator, ion emission happens at high voltage without conduction between the extractor and the accelerator. The results show the advantage of the fabricated two-stage electrodes. Currently, extracted ions were captured mostly at the extractor because of the poor alignment of the emitter silicon chip to the jig.