Yuan-Xia Yang, Liang-Cheng Tu, Shan-Qing Yang, and Jun Luo

School of Physics, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, Hubei 430074, China
(Received 11 May 2011; accepted 10 December 2011; published online 9 January 2012)

Abstact:

This paper reports the performance of a torsion-type thrust stand suitable for studies of micro-Newton thrusters, which is developed for ground testing the micro-Newton thruster in Chinese Test of the Equivalence Principle with Optical readout space mission. By virtue of specially suspending design and precise assembly of torsion balance configuration, the thrust stand with load capacity up to several kilograms is able to measure the impulse bit up to 1350 μNs with a resolution of 0.47 μNs, and the average thrust up to 264 μN with a resolution of 0.09 μN in both open and close loop operation. A pulsed plasma thruster, the preliminary prototype developed for Chinese TEPO space mission, is tested by the thrust stand, and the results reveal that the average impulse bit per pulse is measured to be 58.4 μNs with a repeatability of about 5%. � 2012 American Institute of Physics.