• ION ENGINE PIEZOELECTRIC THRUST VECTORING SYSTEM
• PIEZOELECTRIC ACTUATORS

Ion propulsion system is reliable enough to promise the future propulsion system with higher operational efficiency. Still, there is large number of opportunities to improve ion propulsion system and one among them is thrust vectoring system. Conventionally, Ion engine is mounted on Gimbals to control the thrust vector by moving the whole ion engine in the range of about ±5 degrees. Such gimbal assembly has a complicated geometrical design and add larger mass. Several studies and experiments conducted till date to improve the thrust vectoring system to design compact, preferably mount the thrust-vectoring system within the thruster itself and to reduce overall thrust vectoring system mass. In the past few years, several studies have been conducted on translating the accelerator Grid in the plane perpendicular to the thrust axis with coefficient of 0.003- 0.004 mm per degree of ion beam deflection and is found that this can be a best solution to obtain thrust vectoring in the range of ±8 deg. Use of micro electromechanical system, such as shape memory alloy actuators and piezoelectric actuators are promising. Such actuators need continuous electric supply to keep the grid position accurate and requires robust grid suspension design.
This thesis presents the study of piezo electric actuators and implementation of piezo actuators in ion engine thrust vectoring system. The work is carried out in three phases. In the first phase, the study of ion engine thrust vectoring system and second phase deals with the study of piezoelectric actuators and final phase was carried out on designing piezo electric ion engine thrust vectoring system, by using piezo actuator as the main driver and designing promising suspension by considering mass, accuracy, compactness and robustness of the system.
The proposed design in theory can eliminate the use of existing complex gimbal systems and thereby reducing the overall thruster vectoring system weight considerably. The preliminary application of the mechanism is studied and a proof of concept model is developed. Our findings and possible future works for implementation of this idea in real life are discussed in coming chapters.