An air-breathing electric thruster for near-space vehicle

An air-breathing electric thruster, which uses the Single Dielectric Barrier Discharge (SDBD) technique to generate the plasma, is proposed in this paper for near-space propulsion missions. Using the SDBD plasma source, this air-breathing electric thruster can theoretically operate in a wide range of pressure (from several Pa to 1atm). To investigate the performance of this kind of air-breathing electric thruster, a simple thruster is manufactured and the thrust it produces under different ambient pressure and applied voltage conditions are measurement. The measuring results shows that under a moderate applied voltage, when the pressure ranges from 10 kPa to 90 kPa, the thrust is on the order of 10²~10³ μN. At a certain pressure, the power law correlation is found between the thrust and the applied voltage. With a constant voltage, the thrust increases first to a maximum and then decreases with the gradual decrease of pressure, and the pressure at which the maximum thrust is obtained is a function of the applied voltage.