Development and characterization of fuel and micro nozzles for laser propulsion.

C. SÁNCHEZ AKÉ; D. RODRIGUEZ; N. G. BOGGIO; A. LAMAGNA; J. CODNIA; M. L. AZCÁRATE; M. VILLAGRAN MUÑIZ; C. RINALDI

Playa del Carmen

Congreso; 11TH International Conference on Laser Ablation. Playa del Carmen, México,; 2011

Laser ablation propulsion is superior to other propulsion schemes in terms of specific impulse, ie the efficiency of energy conversion and mass-power ratio. In this sense, the latest experimental results for propulsion using targets with different ratio metal/salt (Zn/CaCO3) show that the coupling efficiency, Cm, is largely dependent on the composition of the target [1]. On the other hand, the development of micro nozzles using MEMS technology in order to couple they with the target allows to establish optimal conditions for the development of laser propulsion system for micro satellites. In this works, in order to improve the coupling efficiency it was studied the ablation process of a set of targets together with different micro-machined nozzles on silicon using photo-induced acoustic IR laser ablation technique. It was performed laser ablation (IR and V) at atmospheric pressure of two targets with 70% and 90% (Zn/CaCO3) composition attached to a piezoelectric crystal. In this way it was obtain the variation of the photo acoustic signal (PA) for each laser emission (IR and ),depending on the target composition and the laser energy. Moreover, the same measurement was performed by attaching different nozzles to each target propulsion. Because of the acoustic signal correlates linearly with Cm [1], after processing the data, it was determined that the nozzle increases the Cm by 20 to 30% for IR laser ablation. These results from the Cm again show that the PA signal can be used to measure the coupling efficiency in the process of laser propulsion.