Development of Bipropellant Gas-Liquid Equilibrium Propulsion System

Abstract

The gas-liquid equilibrium propulsion system mounted on the solar sail IKAROS is restricted to pulse ejection because of the limited capacity to separate the gas and liquid, and thus it is only applicable to attitude control. If the continuous ejection performance is improved, however, this propulsion system can be applied to various small satellites to control the orbit. Continuous ejection is realized by suppressing the cavitation that occurs when the gas is ejected. This study suggests a new system to suppress the cavitation where two types of liquefied gas that are insoluble in each other are used as propellants. This shows the feasibility of improving the performance of continuous ejection based on microgravity experiments.