Experimental Evaluation and Design of Propulsion System For Cubesat: N2o and C2h4 as Green Bipropellant

Abstract

This work proposes a design of a new propulsion module for a 3U CubeSat that will be used for collision avoidance and for deorbiting the spacecraft. We propose a bi-propellant, a mixture of Ethylene and Nitrous oxide which has no toxicity. The bi-propellant system used does not need an additional pressurizing system and will ignite automatically when the mixture will enter the combustion chamber. Due to these features, our propulsion module uses only 1U space of the CubeSat saving 2U for other systems. In this study, a program such as CEA and RPA were used for chemical equilibrium calculation developed in NASA and German Universities. It contains a thermodynamic data library, the PAC99 program which does regression and estimation of thermodynamics, numerical analysis data and chemical equilibrium analyzed by various stimulations. This propulsion evaluation aims at the calculation of efficiency, feasibility and specific impulse obtained was larger than 300 seconds.