Design and Fabrication of a Smart Vaporasing Liquid Microthruster for Cubesat Applications

This paper reports the design and fabrications of a smart vaporizing liquid microthruster for the applications in small satellites. The thruster is fabricated with a conventional anodic bonded silicon-glass wafer stack with a glass capped microfluidic channel but the novelty here is that in-channel heaters and sensors on the glass wafer are combined with on-channel heaters and sensors on the silicon wafer. For example, an on-silicon piezoresistive pressure sensor is combined with an in-channel temperature sensor. Furthermore, the on-silicon heater is built in a recess on the silicon wafer to minimize thermal resistance between heater and channel. The modular designed layout allows the integration of different sensor / heater combinations in the wafer stack to meet an application specific thruster performance, which enables cost effective flexible manufacturing.