Design and Operation of a Thrust Test Stand for University Small Satellite Thrusters

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AIAA-2018-2117.pdf (532.08 KB)
Author(s)
Stevenson, Terry
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Daniel Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering
The Daniel Guggenheim School of Aeronautics was established in 1931, with a name change in 1962 to the School of Aerospace Engineering
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https://hdl.handle.net/1853/74083
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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2018-01
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