Title:
Design and Operation of a Thrust Test Stand for University Small Satellite Thrusters
Design and Operation of a Thrust Test Stand for University Small Satellite Thrusters
Author(s)
Stevenson, Terry
Lightsey, E. Glenn
Lightsey, E. Glenn
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Abstract
A small, low cost thrust test stand was developed at the Georgia Institute of Technology to support ongoing
small spacecraft propulsion research. The test stand is a torsional pendulum with a low natural frequency,
designed to respond to thruster pulses in the range of milliseconds to hundreds of milliseconds as if they were
instantaneous impulses. The stand displacement is measured by an LVDT, and the magnitude of the
oscillation resulting from the thrust is used to determine the impulse delivered. The stand is not actively
damped, and is operated with less time between impulses than the oscillations take to decay. A postprocessing
method was developed to separate the oscillation caused by an impulse from the previous
oscillations, by fitting a damped oscillator equation before and after the impulse, and determining the
instantaneous angular velocity change across the impulse. The stand was used to test a thruster developed at
Georgia Tech for the NASA BioSentinel mission.
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Date Issued
2018-01
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Text
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Paper
Rights Statement
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