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Hall Thruster Testing 11-13-2003
Testing thrusters is quite a pain in the ass. It amounts to a two day process that if everything goes right, there will be four hours of actual thruster operations. So here's the story of the latest test.
Wednesday 2:15pm: The liquid nitrogen tanks are filled over in the physics department. The process takes about 45 minutes a piece and is loud as hell (notice the venting on the right side).
Wednesday 4:27 pm: While moving the tanks the 1/4 mile between buildings, the dead-man on the mover gets stuck and breaks. Of course, there's a friggen blizzard in progress to add to the fun.
Wednesday 4:52 pm: With one tank moved, it was time to go and get the otherone. Notice the snow piling up infront of the door? It really sucked.
Thursday 12:39 am: The pumpdown process has been going now for about 40 minutes and we're down to about 110milliTorr (not much).
Thursday 1:30 am: Here's the trusty LN2 tanks awaiting usage.
Thursday 2:10 am: The cryopump has been turned on so the LN2 begins to flow across the room and make it snow. It's pretty neat.
Thursday 2:45 am: The cryopump has been running for quite a while now and snow has developed on the piping.
Thursday 3:01 am: I'm reall getting bored here so in an attempt to entertain myself, I constructed the worlds largest subwolfer. Using the new vacuum chamber and one of my speakers, a thunderous base response is created.
Thursday 5:28 am: I'm working on doing the mass flow calibrations now that the tank is approching it's pressure limit. You can see that the "vane" of the of the cryopump is down to 13.22Kelvin (or about -436 degrees F).
Thursday 2:32 pm: After a little nap at home, I returned and the thruster was successfully lit. So here's a few pictures of it running.
Thursday 3:40 pm: Trouble strikes! When attempting to ramp the thruster up to full power, something shorts out. All attempts to fiz it without opening the tank fail so the test is terminated early. Once the tank was opened up, the problem was isolated to the thruststand (below). Unfortunatly, it's not a quick fix so further testing is on hold until after Thanksgiving.
