IEPC 2025, London

We are pleased to announce that two of our institute’s researchers – Ms. Valentina Pessina and Mr. Sven Steinert – participated in this year’s 39th International Electric Propulsion Conference (IEPC) held in London. The event brought together specialists from around the world, providing an opportunity to exchange experiences, present research findings, and establish international collaborations. The exchange of ideas and fruitful discussion with fellow participants and leading experts in electric propulsion provided valuable insights and fresh motivation for our ongoing research efforts.

Ms. Valentina Pessina gave a presentation titled "Intake Design for Atmosphere Breathing Electric Propulsion: The Role of Gas Surface Interaction with DSMC Simulations and Potential Machine Learning Applications".

Ms. Pessina ’s work offers valuable insights into current developments in the field and highlights innovative approaches to ongoing research challenges.

The abstract of her presentation can be found below.

This study investigates the performance of an Atmosphere Breathing Electric

Propulsion intake in Very Low Earth Orbit. In the first part, two gas surface interaction

models, the Maxwell model and the Cercignani-Lampis-Lord model, are compared to assess their impact on intake performance, accounting for more or less realistic accommodation coefficients and surface interactions. In the second part, the high-fidelity Direct Simulation Monte Carlo results from the Maxwell model are used as training dataset for the Gaussian Process Regression algorithm. Thus, a surrogate model is developed for predicting intake collection efficiency and compression ratios across varying altitudes (160-220 km), conic slope angles (12–20°), and gas surface interaction conditions, which indirectly accounts for the effect of surface contamination by atomic oxygen. This surrogate model aims at enabling rapid evaluation of intake performance while capturing trends due to altitude, geometry, and surface interactions. This work represents an initial framework that can be extended in future studies to include additional geometric and operational parameters, supporting accelerated atmosphere breathing electric propulsion intake design and mission analysis.

In turn, Mr Steinert presented his research results on Compact Laser Ignition for Vacuum Arc Thrusters.

The summary below offers a brief and accessible overview of his work.

The lifetime of existing Vacuum Arc Thrusters (VATs) is fundamentally limited by their ignition system, motivating the exploration of alternative approaches. This work presents a novel demonstration of a compact laser ignition system based on laser diodes. A pulsed laser driver was developed to generate adjustable pulses. Microsecond laser pulses were focused onto candidate ablation materials biased by a pulse-forming network (PFN), where laser-induced ablation initiated the arc discharge. Experiments demonstrated successful ignition with pyrolytic carbon and graphite. Pyrolytic carbon showed near-instantaneous plasma ignition, suggesting a very low ignition threshold, but poor repeatability as surface modification by the arc discharge prevented further ignitions. Graphite, in contrast, exhibited strong repeatability with example conditions of a 0.65 mm gap, 400 V PFN voltage, and 49 J/cm² over 500 µs at 455 nm. By introducing a nearby flow path, the initial seed arc was elongated and transferred to a secondary material, where the main discharge occurred. This effectively decouples the ignition process from the electrode erosion. These results mark a pivotal step toward the development of VATs fully reliant on laser ignition.

Poster from Mr Steinert's presentation: 

https://virtual.oxfordabstracts.com/event/73412/submission/604/poster

The header banner was sourced from the official conference website. (https://www.imperial.ac.uk/iepc2025/)