Parametric study of an air-breathing electric propulsion for near-space vehicles

An air-breathing electric propulsion system is regarded as a potential alternative propulsion system to the propeller system for near-space vehicles. The goal of this paper is to study the performance of an air-breathing electric thruster based on the single dielectric barrier discharge technology. The generated thrust was measured for various ambient pressures and voltage amplitudes. The results show a nonmonotonic relation between the pressure and the thrust and that the power-law dependence between the voltage and the thrust exists at different pressures. Experiments were also conducted to investigate the effect of both the electrode geometries and the dielectric parameters on the thruster’s performance, indicating that smaller electrode spacing, thinner dielectric, and larger relative permittivity of dielectric can lead to larger thrust in the low-pressure applications, whereas the width of the exposed electrode hardly has an effect. Furthermore, qualitative analyses were performed to explore the internal mechanisms.