Abstract
Conventional monopropellant thrusters for spacecraft utilize the pelletized catalyst bed to decompose the propellant, typically Hydrazine. The catalyst bed consists of Iridium catalyst supported by porous Alumina ceramics pellets. During the long-term operation of the thruster, however, the catalyst is occasionally damaged, which causes several critical problems like a deterioration of the decomposition performance or choke of the capillary tube. In order to solve or mitigate these problems, a new decomposition device was designed and its preliminary model was fabricated and evaluated in our research group. Preliminary tests were conducted to examine the new reaction mechanism using pulsed or stationary AC discharge plasma instead of pelletized catalysts in a bucket type reaction chamber. In the reaction chamber filled with Hydrazine, sudden increase of the temperature and the pressure was observed immediately after the production of plasma discharge. These results show that the plasma is capable of the decomposition of Hydrazine, and acts as catalysts, and that it is worthwhile developing a new monopropellant thruster system using plasma assisted reaction in order to eliminate the disadvantages associated with the pelletized catalyst bed.
