A Theoretical Analysis for Electrodeless Lissajous Acceleration of HELICON Plasmas

摘要

Electrodeless plasma thrusters are expected to extend the lifetime for electric propulsions. The Lissajous accelerator is one of the electromagnetic thrusters which could be as efficient as conventional thrusters such as ion or hall thrusters. Although plasma acceleration had been demonstrated by experiments, the increment of the flow velocity due to the Lissajous acceleration is small compared with thermal velocity. Therefore, optimization of the Lissajous accelerator is required. In this article, an analytical model is used to find the radius of the Lissajous accelerator at which the electromagnetic thrust exceeds the thermal thrust in order to design experiments for verifying the analytical model. The analysis shows that the electromagnetic thrust due to Lissajous acceleration increases more rapidly than the thermal thrust with an increase in the thruster radius.