Investigating Energetic Porous Silicon as a Solid Propellant Micro-Thruster
| dc.contributor.advisor | Bergbreiter, Sarah | en_US |
| dc.contributor.author | Churaman, Wayne Anthony | en_US |
| dc.contributor.department | Mechanical Engineering | en_US |
| dc.contributor.publisher | Digital Repository at the University of Maryland | en_US |
| dc.contributor.publisher | University of Maryland (College Park, Md.) | en_US |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2019-06-19T05:41:03Z | |
| dc.date.available | 2019-06-19T05:41:03Z | |
| dc.date.issued | 2019 | en_US |
| dc.description.abstract | Energetic porous silicon has emerged as a novel on-chip energetic material capable of generating thrust that can be harnessed for positioning of millimeter and micron-scale mobile platforms such as microrobots and nano-satellites. Porous silicon becomes reactive when nano-scale pores are infused with an oxidizer such as sodium perchlorate. In this work, energetic porous silicon was investigated as a means of propulsion by quantifying thrust and impulse produced during the exothermic reaction as a function of porosity. The baseline porous silicon devices were two millimeter diameter and etched to a target depth of 25 microns. As a result of changing porosity, a 7x increase in thrust performance and a 16x increase in impulse performance was demonstrated. The highest thrust and impulse values measured were 680 mN and 266 micron Newton seconds respectively from a 2 mm diameter porous silicon device with 72 % porosity. Limitations and trade-offs associated with arrays of devices were presented by studying the effects of scaling porous silicon area, and characterizing thrust when arrays of porous silicon micro-thruster devices were ignited simultaneously. In addition, the effects of sympathetic ignition were evaluated to better understand how closely independent devices could be physically spaced on a 1 cm2 chip. 3D nozzles were fabricated to study confinement effects by varying nozzle throat diameter, and divergent angle. It was shown that integration of a nozzle (throat diameter of 0.75 mm and a divergent angle of theta = 10 degrees) resulted in approximately 4X increase in thrust, and 4X increase in impulse. This study highlighted enhancements to thrust and impulse generated by porous silicon, identified trade-offs associated with simultaneous activation of multiple devices on a 1 cm2 chip, and showed energetic porous silicon as a viable solid propellant for propulsion of nano-satellites and micro-robots. | en_US |
| dc.identifier | https://doi.org/10.13016/erzv-shp0 | |
| dc.identifier.uri | http://hdl.handle.net/1903/21944 | |
| dc.language.iso | en | en_US |
| dc.subject.pqcontrolled | Mechanical engineering | en_US |
| dc.subject.pquncontrolled | energetic | en_US |
| dc.subject.pquncontrolled | micro-thruster | en_US |
| dc.subject.pquncontrolled | porous silicon | en_US |
| dc.title | Investigating Energetic Porous Silicon as a Solid Propellant Micro-Thruster | en_US |
| dc.type | Dissertation | en_US |
Files
Original bundle
1 - 1 of 1
Loading...
- Name:
- Churaman_umd_0117E_19849.pdf
- Size:
- 8.13 MB
- Format:
- Adobe Portable Document Format