Design of a Microthruster using Laser-Sustained Solid Propellant Combustion

Solid propellants allow thrusters to be light-weight, com-pact and robust because they require neither tank nor valve, Moreover, the solid propellant will not leak, spill or slosh. Consequently, the solid propellant thruster is one of the potential candidates for the microthruster. On the other hand, the control of the solid propellant combustion is difficult, since the conventional solid propellant continues to bum until all the stored propellant is consumed. Although particular devices like thrust reverser were designed to control the combustion, these devices were rarely used in the practical rocket motors. These devices rise thruster weight as well as complicate the thruster operation. In this study, a solid propellant microthruster using laser sustained combustion was designed in order to develop a high-efficiency microthruster overcoming the previously-mentioned difficulty. This designed thruster has semiconductor lasers and non-self-combustible solid propellants in addition to the conventional solid propellant thruster. In this designed thruster, the semiconductor laser controls the combustion of the non-self-combustible solid propellant. In order to demonstrate that the solid propellant combustion is controllable with laser, some non-self-combustible solid propellants were irradiated with the laser at a back-pressure of about 1㎪. A 40-W class Neodymium Yttrium Aluminum Garnet (ND:YAG) laser was used as a tentative alternate to the semiconductor laser. This experiment has shown that the solid propellant combustion was controllable with 10- W class laser irradiation.