Experimental Campaign on a 98% H2O2 Pulsed Thruster

The present paper reports an extensive experimental test campaign on a 1 N class monopropellant pulsed thruster powered by 98% Hydrogen Peroxide developed in the framework of the PulCheR project. More specifically, its propulsive performance in pulse mode operation has been assessed at several operating conditions that include different feeding pressure (from 5 bar to 15 bar), different pulse frequency (from 5 Hz to 75 Hz) and different opening time of the firing valve (from 2.4 ms to 11 ms). The main goal was to fully characterize the propulsive performance of a new catalytic bed configuration with respect to previous experiments and to compare the obtained results with the previous set-up. The current test set-up employs a longer catalytic bed (3 mm instead of 1.5 mm) filled by 400 μm diameter spherical pellets of -Al2O3 covered by Platinum, suitably developed in the framework of the PulCheR project.