This project was developed to test a high power efficiency air-breathing arc jet engine. The typical constraint with arc jets, and one of the reasons for their lack of popularity, is that they have low power efficiency. This is caused by a factor known as the "Frozen Flow Efficiency" where the power required to bring the propellant into the plasma phase is not converted to usable thrust when being expanded through the nozzle. 

This project was set to collect rudimentary data on low specific impulse applications, where the propellant does not have energy "frozen" into the flow by keeping the temperature of the propellant low enough to remain a gas.

Additionally, the project gave me the opportunity to explore coding a simple high voltage engine controller in C for Arduino.

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