Experimental Verification of the Magnetic Field Topography inside a small Hall Thruster

Abstract

The magnetic circuit of a 500 W class Hall thruster, an electric propulsive device for spacecraft, was characterized experimentally and the results compared with simulation in order to verify the design. The commercial 3D gaussmeter, which was used in this work, was additionally recalibrated to compensate for translation and rotation of individual Hall sensors inside the probe. The Stokes stream function approach was applied to reconstruct the magnetic field topography in the thruster. The procedure, carried out on four different cases, yielded very good agreement between simulations and measurements, even for cusped configurations. Presented technique could be used as a robust method of verification of new magnetic circuit designs not only for Hall thrusters but also for a wide class of plasma devices for which detailed knowledge about actual distribution of magnetic field is crucial for optimization.

Searching for Chaotic Behavior in the Ion Current Waveforms of a Hall Effect Thruster

“…Keeping the main operating parameters unchanged, i.e. a krypton mass flow rate of 0.8 mg/s and a coils current ratio of I inn / I out = 7.0 A / 4.0 A (leading to a magnetic field of up to * 500 G in the thruster channel), the discharge voltage was varied in the range 300-700 V. Other coils current ratios are not considered in this paper and have been reported in other works [25,26]. A comparison of thruster performance with krypton and xenon can be found in [27,28].…”