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Communication Dans Un Congrès Année : 2023

The introduction of a virtual radial direction in axial-azimuthal PIC simulations of Hall Thrusters

Federico Petronio
Anne Bourdon
Pascal Chabert

Résumé

Hall Thrusters (HTs) are well-settled space propulsion systems that are nowadays largely used in space missions. In recent years, the need of designing new thrusters has met the great boost in computing capacities: several codes have been developed to guide the development of future thrusters. Among them, particle-in-cell (PIC) codes adopt a kinetic description of the plasma and efficiently describe the evolution of the discharge in an HT. In the present work, we use a bi-dimensional PIC code to simulate the axial-azimuthal plane of such device. Starting from the design of current thrusters, we coupled the PIC code with a model for a RLC filter that damps the large Breathing Mode oscillations. We also introduced a simplified model of the radial dimension, referred to as fake-r, in the 2D axial-azimuthal simulation: at each timestep we remove from the simulation a number of particles corresponding to the Bohm flux at the walls. Several fake-r thicknesses have been tested and their effect on some important plasma parameters are discussed. We also verified that the chosen value for the azimuthal length in PIC simulations has a significant impact on the discharge current evolution.

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Domaines

Plasmas
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Dates et versions

hal-04465742 , version 1 (19-02-2024)

Identifiants

  • HAL Id : hal-04465742 , version 1

Citer

Federico Petronio, Anne Bourdon, Alejandro Alvarez Laguna, Pascal Chabert. The introduction of a virtual radial direction in axial-azimuthal PIC simulations of Hall Thrusters. 37th International Electric Propulsion Conference, Jun 2023, Boston (MA), France. ⟨hal-04465742⟩
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