Propellant Discovery For Electrospray Thrusters Using Machine Learning

TL;DR

This paper develops a machine learning framework to identify suitable ionic liquids as propellants for electrospray thrusters, enabling rapid screening based on molecular structure and physical properties.

Contribution

It introduces a novel ML-based approach to predict ionic liquid suitability for thrusters, utilizing molecular descriptors and explainability techniques.

Findings

Support Vector Machine achieved the best predictive accuracy.

193 candidate ionic liquids identified as potential propellants.

SHAP analysis ranked molecular descriptors by importance.

Abstract

This study introduces a machine learning framework to predict the suitability of ionic liquids with unknown physical properties as propellants for electrospray thrusters based on their molecular structure. We construct a training dataset by labeling ionic liquids as suitable (+1) or unsuitable (-1) for electrospray thrusters based on their density, viscosity, and surface tension. The ionic liquids are represented by their molecular descriptors calculated using the Mordred package. We evaluate four machine learning algorithms: Logistic Regression, Support Vector Machine (SVM), Random Forest, and Extreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost), with SVM demonstrating superior predictive performance. The SVM predicts 193 candidate propellants from a dataset of ionic liquids with unknown physical properties. Further, we employ Shapley Additive Explanations (SHAP) to assess and rank the impact of individual molecular descriptors on model decisions.