Hall Thruster.

Predicting Hall Thruster Operational Lifetime

Potential Contours in Ion Focusing Hall Thruster

The Embedded Electrode Hall Effect Thruster is a modified 10 kW T-220HT with embedded graphite electrodes within the channel wall to study ion focusing for improved thrust-to-power ratio. Previous experiments with the thruster have demonstrated increased performance on xenon with biased electrodes caused by increases in ion energy, propellant efficiency, and a reduction in the plume divergence ...

Energy Analysis of a Hall Thruster Cluster

In an effort to understand the technical issues related to using a cluster of Hall effect thrusters to accomplish missions requiring very high-power electric propulsion systems, testing of four Busek BHT-200-X3 thrusters has begun at both the Air Force Research Laboratory and the University of Michigan. Two separate instruments, the parallel-plate electrostatic energy analyzer and the retarding...

Numerical investigation of a Hall thruster plasma

The dynamics of the Hall thruster is investigated numerically in the framework of a one-dimensional, multifluid macroscopic description of a partially ionized xenon plasma using finite element formulation. The model includes neutral dynamics, inelastic processes, and plasma–wall interaction. Owing to disparate temporal scales, ions and neutrals have been described by set of time-dependent equat...

Hybrid-PIC Simulation of a Hall Thruster

Although several operational codes are available for the prediction of plume dynamics of Hall thrusters and their interactions with spacecraft surfaces, their coverage of the range of physical phenomena involved and their ability to model complex geometries and material combinations has tended to be fairly restricted. We have initiated the development of a more comprehensive suite of models int...