Reliable Non-Swaged Cathode Heater Designs

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. Orbion proposes to design, test, and trade three novel heater options to simplify manufacturability without sacrificing reliability. 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. 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 and material property adjustments to ensure each part is produced within user-defined limits The 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 application The 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

The NASA applications for an innovative, reliable, manufacturable, easily inspectable heater design are far-reaching. Many of the ongoing NASA in-space propulsion programs are only possible using EP systems thus many EP systems are currently under development, e.g. AEPS, NextSTEP, and NEXT-C, all of which require hollow cathodes that use swaged heaters. The proposed efforts have the potential to serve as a risk reduction on-ramp for some of the aforementioned EP programs.

The commercial market is expanding at an unprecedented rate. The number of small sats being manufactured is far exceeding the expert projections that have been published over the past few years, and the projections showed 100s to 1000s of satellites being produced per year! Nearly all satellites being manufactured will have an EP system to meet mission requirements, which need cathode heaters.

This is early/mid-stage (TRL 5) — the most realistic path in is NASA SBIR/STTR, which funds small businesses and research institutions to develop technology aligned with NASA's needs (equity-free, phased funding). Check whether a current SBIR/STTR solicitation topic overlaps with this project's technology area, or contact the project directly (above) to ask.

None of these are guaranteed paths for this specific project — TechPort itself doesn't have an "apply" button. Reaching out to the contact(s) above with a specific question is usually the fastest way to find out what's actually open.