I completed the first full assembly of the SFDS2 tank last night to prep for the first run with the ARC2! Filled with 56g of Adamantane for now, which is probably 50% capacity. This assembly was a learning process for sure, but everything has fit together flawlessly! For this upcoming run, since I only have 1 valve, I plugged the other ports to direct fuel flow through the single integrated valve. I also needed to splice the larger o-ring seals, but everything came together without too much difficulty, given lessons learned from the SFDS1.

Already started working on estimating lifetime degradation and real total impulse based on the data I have so far for the VAT2. I will need to collect more data for the VAT1 and VAT2 to refine the curves, but I think this initial prediction is already far better than industry. Unfortunately, getting this data takes a ridiculously long time and a ton of effort. However, plotting out degredation curves for both the VAT1 and VAT2 will give a potential trend that could be applied to correct for claims based on ideal case impulse over lifetime.

I rebuilt the VAT2 with a new trigger layer and bismuth cathode and am ready to go for another round of impulse bit testing! This time I will take beginning-of-life measurements. If my hunch is correct, expect a long and angry thread on VAT performance reporting. Updates below! Holy shit. Impulse bit at the beginning of life is nuts. This is a shot at 48V. That 16mm of displacement on axis equates to a corrected impulse bit of 129 uNs! My hunch was 150% correct. I'm going to collect the rest of the data, but I'm calling bullshit on the entire VAT field.

Now that the recent VAT2 lifetime test is finally over, it's time to take apart the thruster to inspect the results! After about 45 hours of runtime and 320,000 pulses, it will be interesting to see how it looks! Updates in the thread below! So immediately looking into the bore we can see massive erosion of the bismuth fuel cathode. It seems severely eaten away, actually starting to punch through to the other side, which is pretty decent considering this was a 0.25" thick cathode.

SmallSat has already started! Browsing around the posted content, I came across something that immediately caught my attention - an ionic liquid electrospray thruster! Looking at the poster though, there are some striking similarities to the AIS-ILIS1 (1/)... Here we see the plastic reservoir housing from the poster compared to the ILIS1 renders. Again, besides the difference of being a spike array vs. a slit emitter, the similarity is shocking... (2/)

One of the most interesting and informative parts of testing is the post testing analysis. Last night I demounted the ILIS1 thruster and disassembled it for inspection. Lots of new info was gathered to move forward! Post test pictures and analysis in the thread below! During the end of the second ignition test, I increased thruster emitter voltage, which increased emission output to the point of catastrophic arcing and failure between the extractor and emitter. Here we can see exactly where emission and eventual failure occurred (1/).

Yesterday, I attempted the first ever fueling and ignition of the AIS-ILIS1 ionic liquid electrospray thruster. Fueling started out rocky but ended up succeeding, however the ignition test was unsuccessful. This thread will review the results yesterday and steps forward. Ignition attempts were started at 2x10^-5 Torr. The thruster control sequence started at 1Hz cycle, with thruster power slowly brought up. The Pico 3500P/N supplies turn on at about 2.5V, with a starting output around 800V. (1/)

Finally, for the first time ever, I present the first fully fueled and assembled AIS-ILIS1 ionic liquid ion source electrospray thruster for nanosatellites! We are finally here, the first ever ignition test of this new ultra low cost open source ion thruster! Final wet mass of the thruster is 40 grams. So it is safe to say that this first iteration tiny ion thruster carries 1 gram of fuel. However, operating in purely ionic mode of emission, that one gram can last hundreds of hours at several tens of micronewtons of thrust!

The eBay seller was nice enough to give me a partial refund to cover the cost of the full rebuild kit, which is arriving tomorrow. Over the next few days I will be posting the rebuild of the pump to this thread. So who's ready for an Edwards E2M series vacuum pump teardown! Started to do some disassembly while I wait for the parts to arrive. First thing was taking off the side cover plates to get a look at the motor coupling side. Immediately looks like some fine rubber dust caked inside, suspect some sort of rubber component is worn down.