Kinetic simulations of a cylindrical Hall thruster
POSTER
Abstract
A newly developed 2d3v Particle-in-Cell code with Monte Carlo (MC) Collisions is used to simulate the operation of the PPPL 100 W cylindrical Hall thruster (CHT). The model includes all relevant collisional processes (Coulomb collisions, electron-neutral elastic, ionization and excitation collisions; ion-neutral momentum transfer and charge exchange collisions). The dynamics of the background gas is self-consistently resolved with direct MC simulation. Secondary electron emission at the thruster walls is accounted through a probabilistic MC model. The anomalous electron transport perpendicular to magnetic field is included in the simulation via Bohm-type diffusion. The computational domain includes the thruster channel and the near-field plume region. The self-sustained and the current overrun modes of the CHT operation are studied and compared with experiments.
*This work was supported by the German Space Agency DLR through Project 50 RS 0804, and the U.S. DOE under Contract DE-AC02-09CH11466.