Saba Shaik

Bio:

Saba is a Ph.D. candidate in the Space Propulsion Lab. In 2021, she received her B.S. in Aerospace Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology. Saba’s doctoral work focuses on characterizing mass loss mechanisms in electrospray sources. Previously, she researched electrochemistry in electrospray thrusters for her S.M. thesis, and electrospray facility effects at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab.

Research Summary:

The dominant efficiency loss in electrospray propulsion systems is “anomalous mass loss”, a phenomenon where a thruster sheds propellant that does not appear in its exhaust. This apparent loss could simply be explained by large measurement errors due to the difficulty of resolving the vanishingly small mass flow rates (~ng-μg per second) processed by individual ion sources. Alternatively, there may be physical mechanisms besides electrospraying by which propellant is consumed. Our research aims to address both possibilities with the development of highly precise diagnostics for electrospray flow rate measurements, and investigation of potential loss mechanisms (e.g. ion cluster fragmentation, electrochemistry) through modeling and experimentation. This work supports the development of more efficient electrospray devices for spacecraft propulsion and focused ion beam applications.