SBIR-STTR Award

The most significant hardware costs on a missile interceptor propulsion system are associated with the thrusters, for which there are typically four divert thrusters and four, six, or eight attitude control thrusters per interceptor. Reducing the cost of the valve/injector for the bipropellant thrusters will result in a significant reduction of the interceptor propulsion system. Current high-performance divert and attitude control thrusters have integrated valve/injectors, which currently have long lead-times and high cost because of the serial manufacturing steps inherent with the valve and injector sharing a common body. Cost reduction of the valve/injector can be accomplished through design without sacrificing thruster performance. While maintaining the benefits of the integrated valve/injector, a study is proposed to design, build, and test hardware where the valve body and injector face are fabricated in parallel. The integration of the injector to the valve will occur after the valve and injector bodies have completed their individual fabrication steps, including drilling the injector orifices. In addition to the cost savings afforded by the parallel manufacturing steps, this design will allow laser-drilling of the injector orifices, which will reduce injector drilling times significantly.

Keywords:
Valve, Injector, Low-Cost, Laser-Drilling

The most significant hardware costs on a missile interceptor propulsion system are associated with the thrusters, for which there are typically four divert thrusters and four, six, or eight attitude control thrusters per interceptor. The largest contributor to the thruster cost is the integrated valve/injector. Integration of the valve and injector into a single body provides the benefits of low dribble volume, low weight, and fast response. However, the current designs are subject to serial manufacturing steps, adding to the component’s cost and scchedule. A novel concept for the fabricating the injector was proposed by Montcorp for its Phase I program. A full-scale design was demonstrated in the Phase I effort, which represents the first integrated valve/injector concept that allows complete fabrication of the injector faceplate (including orifices and acoustic cavities) before integration with the valve body. This design provides significant cost and schedule savings in the fabrication of the valve/injector. The Phase II program will accomplish continued design, development, and hot-fire testing of multiple integrated valve/injectors using the injector faceplate concept developed in Phase I. Duty cycles from the qualification of a characteristic production thruster will be used.

Keywords:
Valve, Injector, Valve/Injector, Divert Thruster