Mao Wei

Abstract: A discharge channel with a chamfered wall not only has application in the design of modern Hall thrusters, but also exists where the channel wall is eroded, and so is a common status for these units. In this paper, the laws and mechanisms that govern the effect of the chamfered wall on the performance of a Hall thruster are investigated. By applying both experimental measurement and particle-in-cell simulation, it is determined that there is a moderate chamfer angle that can further improve the optimal performance obtained with a straight channel. This is because the chamfering of the wall near the channel exit can enhance ion acceleration and effectively reduce ion recombination on the wall, which is favorable to the promotion of the thrust and efficiency. However, the chamfer angle should not be too large; otherwise, both the density of the propellant gas and the distribution of the plasma potential in the channel are influenced, which is undesirable for efficient propellant utilization and beam concentration. Therefore, it is suggested that the chamfer shape of the channel wall is an important factor that must be carefully considered in the design of Hall thrusters.

TL;DR: In this article, a Multi-cusped field thruster MCFT-2139 is designed and a nitrogen ignition experiment is conducted to evaluate the feasibility of this technology, the thruster could operate in an extremely large power range from 6 × 10−2 W to 1.3 × 103 W.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors compare multiple groups of constant voltage power supply mode (U mode) and traditional constant current power supply (I mode) for the same structural heater, and reliability analysis is performed using two-parameter Weibull distribution.

TL;DR: In this paper, a double-layer pore plate type gas distributor is presented, which consists of a gas guiding column, a distributor base, a first-layer plate, a second-layer pipe, an outer baffle, an inner baffle and a fixing column.