Electrospray thruster design
Electrospray thrusters produce thrust by extracting and accelerating liquid ionic droplets from a porous substrate using a strong applied electric field. The task of scaling electrospray thrusters to missions with higher thrust requirements is one of seeking robust designs in the presence of high manufacturing uncertainties in the extractor grid and porous substrate. This project explored Bayesian methods for aiding electrospray thruster design in light of these manufacturing uncertainties.
Fig 1. The AFET-2 electrospray thruster (Natisan et al. 2020).