Numerical Modeling of Rotating Spokes in Hall Thruster Discharge Plasma

摘要

Rotating spoke is a coherent structure observed in cross-field devices, such as Hall effect thrusters (HETs), magnetrons, and Penning discharges. In spite of being frequently observed in the experiments, it has been numerically challenging to perform stable calculations using electron fluid models to model rotating spokes. It is suggested that the electron fluid model using drift-diffusion approximation is mathematically ill-conditioned due to the differences (e.g. 100-1000 times) in the characteristic speeds of the electron velocity in the axial and azimuthal directions