Thrust stand for ground tests of solid propellant microthrusters

A pendulum type balance has been designed and fabricated to characterize solid propellant microthrusters. The thrust measurement system mainly consists of a rigid arm rotating freely around a pivot and a feedback control loop. The deflection of the arm produced by the applied thrust is detected using a high frequency transmitter and an antenna. The principle of the measurement is to compensate exactly the thrust force applied to the pendulum by injecting a current in a coil. The measurement of this current gives a perfect image of the thrust force. This article presents the design and performances of the balance. The thrust force measurement sensitivity is 25 μN and the system bandwidth is 40 Hz. Using this balance, single cylindrical thrusters have been characterized. The results gave less than a 1% error between experiment and theoretical evaluation.