Impulse Drive

In Star Trek universe, impulse drive is a propulsion system of spacecrafts for interplanetary travel. This project is trying to design a real-world impulse drive. The basic characteristics of this engine are

• Electric propulsion
• Large thrust
• Long specific impulse
• No or little moving parts
• Good scalability
• Low cost

We'd like to make it easy to implement, so people can build it as a hobby project.

NOTE: Please turn on git LFS when cloning this project.

Method

There are many different engine designs for spacecraft propulsion, check wikipedia for a list. The only one design among them that fits these requirements is magnetoplasmadynamic thruster, a.k.a, MPDT or MPD thruster. More details in MPD.

Our design is based on MPDT, with several significant improvements.

Design

The principle of our design, and a detailed introduction of modules are in Design

Disclaimer

MPD thruster is operated by LETHALLY high voltage and current. If you don't have enough knowledge and experiences on high voltage electric, please keep extreme cautions on insulation.

Directories

• Circuit folder is the electric design of the system. The files can be open by KiCad
• 3DModel folder is the 3D model design of some components. It's in Blender format.
• Doc folder contains some documents

License

ImpulseDrive is distributed under the terms of MIT License. See LICENSE for details.