Simulations of the FORMOSAT-5 Cold Gas Propulsion System by Using the Hybrid Continuum-Particle Method

Reaction control subsystem (RCS) is an onboard satellite propulsion system used to provide required thrusting for orbit raising, orbit maintenance, and attitude control etc.. High pressure flow with high temperature could be generated in a chamber by chemical reactions or other power resources then expelled through a convergent-divergent nozzle to obtain thrust. In order to optimize the thrusting performance, numerical simulation is an efficient method to study the physics and parameters in design phase. In the current study, a hybrid method coupled continuum and particle methods is proposed to simulate flows involving continuum and rarefied regions. The Navier-Stokes (NS) solver named UNIC is developed by Chen and his coworkers. It employs the cell-centered finite-volume method with a hybrid 2D/3D unstructured-grid topology. The proposed particle code named Parallel DSMC Code (PDSC) is a parallelized solver based on the well-known Direct Simulation of Monte Carlo (DSMC) method, which was proposed by Bird in 1976. The physical domain is decomposed into several regimes and each sub-domain executes the serial DSMC code at different processor for speeding up the computing. A practical cold gas thruster with different chamber pressures is simulated by using this hybrid code to study the potential malfunction of the pressure regulator. Then the curve-fitting thrusting equation can be referred to satellite control operations.