Interactions of Electric Propulsion Plumes With a Complete Spacecraft

摘要

The objective of this Grant was the development of computational tools to analyze the interactions of Electric Propulsion thrusters with complex structures, such as complete Spacecraft, spacecraft in a vacuum tank, or a neighboring formation-flying spacecraft. This entailed substantial extensions and refinements of previous 3D Hybrid PIC code, including adoption of an unstructured tetrahedral grid, mating of this grid to surface grids generated by commercial solid modeling software, integration into the AFRL COLISEUM architecture, allowance for non-quasineutral regions due to obstacles in the plume, streamlining of the collisional operators (no-counter DSMC, MCC option) and allowance of a non-constant electron temperature. Several verifications were run against laboratory data, including plume surveys in our Laboratory of the BHT-200 thruster and a shield-wake experiment of J. Pollard using the larger PPL-90 thruster. This Report summarizes these accomplishments, mainly by reference to the several papers and Theses that were generated, copies of which are attached as a CD.