NASA STTR 2020-I Solicitation

Proposal Summary

PROPOSAL NUMBER:
 20-1- T2.04-5261
SUBTOPIC TITLE:
 Advanced in-space propulsion
PROPOSAL TITLE:
 Advanced Design Tools for Electrosail Propulsion Systems
SMALL BUSINESS CONCERN (SBC):
Particle Matters, Inc.
2324 Venndale Avenue
San Jose CA  95124 - 4929
Phone: (818) 527-5432
RESEARCH INSTITUTION (RI):
Stanford University
485 Broadway Street, Third Floor
CA  94063 - 3136
Phone: (650) 724-0907

Principal Investigator (Name, E-mail, Mail Address, City/State/Zip, Phone)

Name:
Sergey Gimelshein
E-mail:
particlemattersinc@gmail.com
Address:
2324 Venndale Ave San Jose, CA 95124 - 4929
Phone:
(818) 527-5432

Business Official (Name, E-mail, Mail Address, City/State/Zip, Phone)

Name:
Sergey Gimelshein
E-mail:
particlemattersinc@gmail.com
Address:
2324 Venndale Ave San Jose, CA 95124 - 4929
Phone:
(818) 527-5432
Estimated Technology Readiness Level (TRL) :
Begin: 1
End: 3
Technical Abstract (Limit 2000 characters, approximately 200 words)

The goal of this project is to develop a medium-fidelity, engineering level computational tool that will provide NASA researchers with an efficient instrument for testing, optimizing, and finalizing the E-Sail configuration, and further assist in the navigation and control design. The core of the tool is a computationally efficient parallel 3D Particle-In-Cell (PIC) code. The relatively slow progress in computational modeling of a solar-wind flow over an E-sail to a large extent could be explained by a multi-scale nature of such flow.  On the spatial scale, typical diameter of a wire in the tether assembly of an E-sail is on the order of several micron, while the total span of an E-sail may reach 100 km. On the time scale, the electron time scale is on the order of millisecond, while the E-sail based reference is many orders of magnitude larger.  In the proposed work, the multi-scale solar wind flow around an E-sail will be predicted through the development of a physically realistic boundary conditions that model the spacecraft charging and plasma sheath around the tethers, and its application in full 3D modeling.

Several factors contribute to the novelty and the importance of the proposed work: (i) the code will be designed specifically for E-sail modeling, starting from setting arbitrary tether assembly, and to computing all parameters of importance for E-sail optimization; (ii) modeling will be truly multi-scale, with attention to the entire solar wind environment of an E-sail resolved down to the Debye sheath; (iii) a number of code performance improvement algorithms will be assessed, of which the best will be used in the code; and (iv) data-driven models that use Kalman filters will be applied to provide assistance in the design and performance control stages.

Potential NASA Applications (Limit 1500 characters, approximately 150 words)

Astrophysics: problems involving kinetic effects with complex nonlinear interactions between electromagnetic fields and background plasma, such as cosmic rays. 
Spacecraft propulsion: electric and plasma thrusters. 
Spacecraft performance: plasma interactions, spacecraft charging, attitude control.  
Satellite problems: contamination assessment and electric arc. 

Potential Non-NASA Applications (Limit 1500 characters, approximately 150 words)

Industry: plasma-assisted nano- and micro-fabrication technologies such as dry etching in lithography, low
temperature direct bonding, and plasma-enhanced chemical vapor deposition.
Government: spacecraft charging, advanced electric propulsion technologies, and surface contamination.
 

 

Duration: 12
Form Generated on 06/29/2020 21:13:51