Characterisation and thrust measurements from electrolytic decomposition of Ammonium Dinitramide (ADN) based liquid monopropellant FLP-103 in MEMS thrusters

Although Ammonium Dinitramide (ADN) has been targeted as a potential green monopropellant in future space vehicles, its application potential in Micro-electrical-Mechanical System (MEMS) thrusters or microthrusters have seldom reported in open literature. In this paper, electrolytic decomposition of Ammonium dinitramide (ADN)-based liquid monopropellant FLP-103 were carried out in open chamber and MEMS thrusters fabricated from Poly-Dimethylsiloxane (PDMS) to characterize the power consumption. Two thrust measurement methods were employed to investigate the electrolytic decomposition of FLP-103 in MEMS microthrusters. The results show that the monopropellant can be successfully ignited at room temperature through 80V,0.1A (8W) using copper wire as electrodes. In the current thruster design, low thrust was obtained at FLP-103 flowrate of 40µl/min but it generated the highest specific impulse, Isp, among all the flowrates tested. The experiments successfully demonstrated the potential application of electrolytic decomposition of FLP-103 in MEMS thrusters.