Performance Comparison between a Magnesium- and Xenon-fueled 2 kW Hall Thruster

The performance metrics of a 2-kW-class thruster operated using magnesium propellant was measured and compared to the performance of the same thruster operated using xenon propellant. It was found that the magnesium thruster has thrust ranging from 34 mN at 200 V to 39 mN at 300 V with 1.7 mg/s of propellant. It was found to have 27 mN of thrust at 300 V using 1.0 mg/s of propellant. The thrust-to-power ratio ranged from 24 mN/kW at 200 V to 18 mN/kW at 300 volts. The specific impulse was 2000 s at 200 V and upwards of 2700 s at 300 V. The anode efficiency was found to be ~23% using magnesium which is substantially lower than the 40% anode efficiency of xenon at approximately equivalent molar flow rates. A comparison of the angular ion current distribution in the plasma beam revealed that the magnesium-fueled thruster has a much larger beam divergence than the xenon-fueled thruster.