The Numerical Simulation of Plasma Flow in Cylindrical Resonant Cavity of Microwave Plasma Thruster

摘要

Microwave Plasma Thruster (MPT) is an electro-thermal propulsive device. MPT consists of microwave generator, gas storing and supplying system, resonant cavity and accelerative nozzle. It generates free-floating plasma brought by the microwave discharge breakdown gas in the resonant cavity, and the plasma exhausted from nozzle produces thrust. MPT has prospective application in spacecraft because of its advantages of high thrust, moderate specific impulse and high efficiency. In this paper, the numerical simulation of the coupling flow field of microwave plasma in resonant cavity under different frequencies will be discussed. The results of numerical simulation are as follows: 1) When the resonant model TM_011 was used, the higher the microwave frequency was, the smaller the size of MPT. The distribution of the electromagnetic field in small cavity, however, remained unchanged. 2) When the resonant model was used, the distribution of the temperature, the pressure and the electronic density in the resonant cavity remained unchanged under different resonant frequencies. 3) When the resonant frequency was increased with a fixed pressure distribution in a small cavity, compare to the MPT with lower frequency, the gas flow rate, the microwave power and the nozzle throat diameter of MPT all decreased. And the thrust of MPT became small. 4) The electromagnetic field in the cylindrical resonant cavity for all MPT with different frequencies was disturbed by the plasma formation The strong disturbance happened in the region close to the plasma