Design and development of a propulsion system for a cubesat - Based on solid propellant cool gas generator technology

Orbital manoeuvring is the next challenge in the development of cubesats. In this study a propulsion system for a cubesat with the main purpose of providing orbit manoeuvring and formation flying has been designed. This propulsion system is basically a cold gas system but it does not use a pressurised tank to store the gas, instead the propellant is chemically stored in cool gas generators. By storing the propellants chemically bounded in a solid material the system has no leakage, is unpressurised and can be stored for a long time without attendance. This advanced technology, developed by TNO, has already been used for a propulsion system, which will fly on the PR0BA2 mission and provides a good opportunity to store propellant in a volume efficient way. Based on this propulsion system, needed changes and improvements of the system have been investigated in order to make it suitable for cubesats. This all led to a preliminary design of a scaled down system which has been designed using requirements for formation flying and which has the capability of being adaptive to any requirements and cubesat configuration due to its modular design principle. The system is capable to store as much gas as a normal tank solution by using only 1/6 of the volume. Within this study a development model has been built and tested. The successful tests verified the design of the micro gas generators and provide a promising basis for further steps.