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Hi AstroWill! Great to make your acquaintance. Thank you for the link.
What kind of thrust range are you looking at for your work? One of the challenges I faced in the past was finding a way to accurately measure thrust while in vacuum. Electric propulsion is a special case since the thrust-to-weight ratio can often prohibit you from simply thrusting into a scale – the resolution might not be precise enough. It’s possible to get away with it if accuracy isn’t your main concern, though.
The pendulum approach has worked for a few people (it worked for me with a 1-10 mN thrust range), but you need to get a handle on your heat dissipation or it will warp the measurements, especially for long-duration testing.
Check out Brett Tartler’s work at https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/59568