Improvements to a fully kinetic Hall thruster simulation code and characterization of the cylindrical cusped field thruster
Name
890394666-MIT.pdf
Description
Full printable version
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9.72 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
3ec65f891dbeaf443f9f3907598404a4
Author(s)
Boulanger, Louis, S.M. Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Advisor(s)
Manuel Martínez-Sánchez.
Date Issued
2014
Publisher
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Abstract
This thesis presents an effort towards a better understanding of the operation of miniaturized cylindrical Hall thrusters. This class of space propulsion devices has come under attention since the 1990s as a possible candidate for the propulsion of 100-1000 kg satellites. In first part, a fully kinetic simulation code developed at the MIT Space Propulsion Laboratory (SPL) is described and applied to two devices of interest: the Princeton Cylindrical Hall Thruster (CHT) and the MIT DCFT (Diverging Cusped-Field Thruster). During this simulation effort, limitations of PTpic were identified which prompted a major redesign, whose central idea is a better parallelization of the workload. At the same time, possible candidates to replace the leapfrog algorithm in the particle pusher have been studied. This work is described in Chapter 3. Finally, chapter 4 presents the results of the testing of the recently built Cylindrical Cusped-Field Thruster (CCFT) performed at the SPL.
Description
Thesis: S.M., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, 2014.
Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.
Includes bibliographical references (pages 97-99).
Subjects
Aeronautics and Astronautics.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics
Terms of Use
M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.
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