Statistical Characterization of Emitter Fabrication over Electrospray Array Thruster

A method for characterizing the variance in fabrication of emitters and extractors in a porous conical electrospray array thruster is presented. Coherence scanning interferometry is used to produce topographic maps of 543 of 576 sites within the array. The emitter and extractor geometries, features of size a few hundred micrometers, are modeled as a spherically capped cone recessed from a circular aperture. Regressing this model against the topographic maps yields a set of salient parameters that describe the geometry of a site, including the tip radius and height of the emitter and its offset from the extractor aperture. Statistics over the emitter geometries are computed, which represent manufacturing tolerances. It is found that key parameters like the emitter tip radius are highly variable (mean [Formula: see text] and standard deviation [Formula: see text]), highlighting the stochastic nature of the manufacturing process. Correlations between the tip radius and emitter height indicate that this variability arises from blunting of the emitters during fabrication, and the observation that emitters are shorter than nominal is explained by an increase in effective cutting diameter of the tools. Further analysis indicates that determining the mean emitter tip radius of the entire population within 5% error requires over 300 individual emitter measurements. These results indicate that accurately quantifying emitter variability at scale requires rigorous and extensive analysis, and the implications of this emitter variability for device performance and design are discussed.