Supercritical Xe as Propellant in Satellite Electric Propulsion System: Experimental Study on Thermal Physical Properties

Abstract Supercritical Xenon was used in satellite electric propulsion system as propellant. The supercritical physical properties of Xenon have a great influence on the pressure-temperature relationship during filling and storage. The Burnett isochoric coupling method was used to test the PνT date of Xenon in this paper. A test system was established to obtain the critical test data for Xeon. Near the critical temperature, the calculation results by REFPROP are significantly larger than the experimental results in this work, up to 6 kPa. The reliability and high precision of the experimental data in this work are verified by the data from literature and the data calculated by NIST’s REFPROP software.