Using electricity to produce heat is something that everyone is familiar with. Space heaters and central heating are the obvious examples, but any electrical circuit produces heat due to electrical resistance within the system; this is why incandescent light bulbs and the computer that you’re reading this on get hot. This is resistive heating (or joule or Ohmic heating), and in a propulsion application this is called a “resistojet,” or an “electro-thermal thruster.” Often, this is used as a second stage for a chemical reaction – in this case the use of hydrazine propellant that undergoes catalysis to force chemical decay into a more voluminous gas. This two-stage approach is something that we’ll see again with a different heating method later in this post.
The first use of resistojets was with the Vela military satellites (first launched in 1963, canceled in 1985), which used a suite of instruments to detect nuclear tests from space, using a BE-3A AKM thruster (which I can’t find anything but the name of, if someone has documentation, please leave it in a comment below). The Intelsat-V program also used resistojet thrusters, and it has become a favored station-keeping option for smallsats. The reason for this is that the thrust is produced thermally, with no need for chemically reactive components, which is often pretty much a requirement for smallsats, which generally speaking are secondary payloads for larger spacecraft, and as such need to be absolutely safe for everything around them in order to get permission to be placed on the launch vehicle.
One of the main advantages of the resistojet is that they can achieve very high thrust efficiencies of up to 90%. Resistojets are primarily limited by two factors: first, the heat resistance of the Ohmic elements themselves; and second, the thermal transfer capacity of the system. As we have seen in NTRs, the ability to remove heat needs to be balanced with the heat produced, and the overall system needs to provide enough thrust to be useful. In the case of propelling a spacecraft on interplanetary missions, this is unlikely to come out to a useful result; however, for station-keeping with a high thrust requirement, it proves to be useful as shown in figure ## naming a few examples of satellites with EP. Exhaust velocities of about 3500 m/s are possible with decomposed hydrazine monopropellant, at about 80% efficiency. According to the ESA, specific impulse on this type of system is between 150 and 700 s of isp depending on the propellant, which is the bottom of the electric propulsion range.
Return to the Electrothermal Thruster landing page
Sources
Resistojet
Vela spacecraft, Gunters’ Space Page profile https://space.skyrocket.de/doc_sdat/vela.htm
Alta Space Systems Resistojet page: https://web.archive.org/web/20130604101644/http://www.alta-space.com/index.php?page=resistojet