Design and Optimization of vacuum Intake for Atmosphere-Breathing electric propulsion (ABEP) system

Atmosphere-breathing electric propulsion system is a concept for space mission for ultra-low Earth orbit, which can collect the rarefied atmospheric particles as propellant to compensate the aerodynamic drag. In the best case, it can extend the lifetime of spacecraft without carrying any propellant. As the key component of Atmosphere breathing electric propulsion system, intake device can capture the ambient particles and drive propellant to electric thruster. Considering the requirement of propellant mass flow and ionization efficiency, the performance of intake needs to be improved, including capture efficiency and compression ratio. The previous studies about intake device are summarized and analyzed firstly in this paper, and a new intake device is proposed that consists of tapered chamber, grid ducts and tube. Then, the inlet boundary conditions are set based on the NRLMSISE-00 atm model, such as particle species, natural temperature, number density and so on. Lastly, the intake performance is analyzed under different gas-surface interaction models through Direct Simulation Monte Carlo method. Simulation results show that the combination of parabola chamber, honeycomb grid ducts and a certain length of tube is benefit to intake device under the mixture reflection model of specular and diffuse. The capture efficiency is 65.79% with a high compression ratio of 210.2.