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The capillary-based pulsed plasma thruster (PPT) has high-energy transfer efficiency, which provides potential to improve traditional PPT performance. In this paper, the discharge characteristics of a capillary-based PPT have been investigated. First, the typical process of voltage and current waveform is recognized. It is featured with a fast voltage drop (~25 ns) and a consequent damped sine wave oscillation discharge. Then based on the circuit analysis, the equivalent plasma resistance has been calculated. The current waveform is well fit with a linearly increasing resistance model. The influence of charging voltage has also been studied. The deposited energy increases while the transfer efficiency decreases with the increasing applied voltage. The cavity dimension has effects on the equivalent circuit parameters. The results show that longer cavity and smaller diameter lead to more deposited energy and higher transfer efficiency. The influence of voltage and capillary dimension on the mass shot characteristic has been discussed. Finally, the estimated impulse bit has been calculated and the impulse bit characteristics have been discussed. These results can contribute to the further optimization of PPT. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The lifetime tests for High Voltage Ceramic Capacitors (HVCC) were investigated under repetitive frequency operation at 25 Hz and three kinds of failure modes were summarized. The significant innovation of this paper is testing HVCC, made in the laboratory, under repetitive pulses and proposing several effective improvement methods. The results show that the lifetime of HVCC meets inverse power-law with the applied voltage and the voltage acceleration factor is about 5.8. Failure modes of HVCC are inner breakdown of ceramic dielectric, interface breakdown of ceramic-epoxy and abscission of brass terminals. The inner breakdown is in connection with abrupt destructive discharge under much higher stress while the interface breakdown is related to interface delamination and development of electrical trees in relatively low strength. The third failure mode is always caused by high current density. Based on the failure modes, several methods were taken to improve the performance of HVCC, which included coating semiconductor at the edge of silver layers, adding coupling agent to ceramic-epoxy interface and improving the structure of brass terminals. The lifetime of HVCC under repetitive frequency operation has been extended greatly from 103 shots to more than 105 shots after the investigation and improvement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]