Improvements to a fully kinetic Hall thruster simulation code and characterization of the cylindrical cusped field thruster

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.