Development of Kabila rocket: A radioisotope heated thermionic plasma rocket engine
| Autor: | Junxue Ren, Kalomba Mboyi, Yu Liu |
|---|---|
| Jazyk: | angličtina |
| Rok vydání: | 2015 |
| Předmět: |
Radioisotopes
Engineering business.product_category Thermoelectric power business.industry Antimatter rocket Nuclear engineering Mechanical Engineering Thermionic Electrical engineering Aerospace Engineering Rocket propellant TL1-4050 Self-sufficiency principle Cold gas thruster Plasma Fission-fragment rocket Rocket Rocket engine Specific impulse business Nuclear power in space Motor vehicles. Aeronautics. Astronautics |
| Zdroj: | Chinese Journal of Aeronautics, Vol 28, Iss 2, Pp 427-433 (2015) |
| ISSN: | 1000-9361 |
| Popis: | A new type of plasma rocket engine, the Kabila rocket, using a radioisotope heated thermionic heating chamber instead of a conventional combustion chamber or catalyst bed is introduced and it achieves specific impulses similar to the ones of conventional solid and bipropellant rockets. Curium-244 is chosen as a radioisotope heat source and a thermal reductive layer is also used to obtain precise thermionic emissions. The self-sufficiency principle is applied by simultaneously heating up the emitting material with the radioisotope decay heat and by powering the different valves of the plasma rocket engine with the same radioisotope decay heat using a radioisotope thermoelectric generator. This rocket engine is then benchmarked against a 1 N hydrazine thruster configuration operated on one of the Pleiades-HR-1 constellation spacecraft. A maximal specific impulse and power saving of respectively 529 s and 32% are achieved with helium as propellant. Its advantages are its power saving capability, high specific impulses and simultaneous ease of storage and restart. It can however be extremely voluminous and potentially hazardous. The Kabila rocket is found to bring great benefits to the existing spacecraft and further research should optimize its geometric characteristics and investigate the physical principals of its operation. |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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