Orbion Space Technology, Inc. — National Aeronautics and Space Administration SBIR Phase I: Z10

Description

To ensure high reliability, traditional cathode heaters undergo complex material inspections, challenging manufacturing ops, time-consuming thermal/cycle testing, onerous electrical testing, and difficult-to-assess X-ray inspections, and even after executing all of the aforementioned qualified/heritage procedures a high percentage of as-built heaters fail one of the many acceptance tests, which is costly financially, for scheduling, and from a human resource standpoint.nbsp; Orbion proposes to design, test, and trade three novel heater options to simplify manufacturability without sacrificing reliability.nbsp; Heater options include; 1) an integrated heater/insert using enabling/new refractory metal additive manufacturing (AM) technology, 2) an inductively heated (IH) insert which has historically been challenging due to electronics availability, and 3) an RF plasma heated insert that shares the historical electronics problem with IH tech that is no longer a problem due to the availability of space-rated integrated circuits with the appropriate frequency/power capabilities.nbsp;To achieve manufacturability, reliability, and cost-savings, each proposed heater option has inherent advantages over the incumbent (swaged) heaters, including;The AM option can be manufactured using refractory metals (and high temp alloys) while implementing on-the-fly automated layer-by-layer quality inspections andnbsp;material property adjustments to ensure each part is produced within user-defined limitsThe inductive heater option eliminates swaging processes altogether, focuses heater power where it is needed, and pushes failure modes away from cathode hardware and into power electronics, which are readily available for this applicationThe RF heater option may completely eliminate additional heater components in the cathode; heat is deposited locally via targeted plasma formation, and failure modes are moved away from hardware and into readily available power electronics