Comprehensive Investigation of the Role of Vacuum Facility Pressure on High-Power Hall Thruster Testing

摘要

Closed-Drift Hall thrusters (CDTs) have great potential in satisfying many of the spacecraft propulsion needs of the United States Air Force for the next several decades. Its combination of high specific impulse, high thrust efficiency, and high thrust density makes it very attractive for a number of earth-orbit missions. However, due to the wide range of facilities used in CDT testing, it is difficult for researchers to make adequate comparisons between data sets because of both dissimilar instrumentation and backpressures. Thus, a tool is needed that allows researchers to obtain relevant plume data for a variety of chambers and backpressures. To this end, our work for this one-year effort has focused on studying the effectiveness of collimated Faraday probes in obtaining ion current density profiles of CDTs. A collimated probe is attractive because it offers the possibility of obtaining the true ion current density profile regardless of facility pumping speed by filtering low-energy charge- exchange collisions ions from the collector. We compare the ion current density profiles obtained simultaneously with collimated and 'nude' probes one meter from a CDT, at two facility pumping speeds and at thruster power levels between 1.5 and 5.0 kW.