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Tailoring the hydraulic impedance of out-of-plane micromachined electrospray sources with integrated electrodes

An electrospray spacecraft thruster offers the potential of the lowest cost and complexity of electric propulsion systems, retaining high specific impulse (>2500s). The collaborative design solution identified and validated herein demonstrated the new style capillary emitter achieves the high throughput (hence thrust) of a capillary, whilst also operating in ion mode, previously only obtained with lower thrust externally wetted systems. This approach was critical to the award of the FP7 ~€2 million Microthrust programme to Stark and collaborators, for full breadboard testing of the concept, with the design adopted by others including the Yale group (J. Appl. Phys 154901 (2013)).