In the present work, a micro-thruster chip with dimension of 19.5 mm x 9.5 mm was fabricated with MEMS technologies for the experiment study of vaporizing liquid micro-thruster. In addition, a full 3D computational model was constructed to simulate the aft section of a vaporizing liquid micro-thruster for investigating flow characteristics. The results show that there were four distinct flow patterns observed in this study including snake flow, vapor-droplet flow, vapor-droplet-jet flow, and vapor flow. To prevent the failure of micro-thruster chip from generating of snake flow, the heating treatment of an empty micro-thruster chip at 300 deg C for 2 h was the key factor. The generation of vapor flow preliminarily proved that the concept of vaporizing liquid micro-thruster chip was feasible. Furthermore, the numerical model in this study successfully provided the thrust estimation. The channel cross-section of 1 mm x 100 mum designed in this study was fit for developing a micro-thruster of O(mN) (ranging from 1 to 6 mN approximately). The numerical simulation could match better with the experiment results for the vapor flow cases if the flow oscillation was taken into consideration, and the heating channel of micro-thruster was lengthened to completely vaporize the liquid water.


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    Title :

    Simulation and experiment research on vaporizing liquid micro-thruster


    Additional title:

    Simulation und experimentelle Untersuchung eines Mikroschubantriebes auf Basis verdampfter Flüssigkeit


    Contributors:

    Published in:

    Publication date :

    2010


    Size :

    10 Seiten, 13 Bilder, 13 Quellen




    Type of media :

    Article (Journal)


    Type of material :

    Print


    Language :

    English




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