An experimental investigation of cusped magnetic field discharge chambers

Abstract

Several features of a proposed model of ion thruster performance are tested experimentally. The experiment conducted demonstrates the effects of variation in thruster operating parameters on the average plasma ion energy costs and extracted ion fractions of various ring and line cusp discharge chambers. The results indicate that the model correctly predicts the variation in the plasma ion energy cost resulting from changes in: propellant gas, grid transparency to neutral atoms, beam extraction area, and discharge voltage. In addition, the model is shown to be applicable to both ring and line cusp designs. Measurements of the extracted ion fraction indicate that this parameter tends to increase with decreasing discharge voltage and is generally higher for operation with argon as opposed to krypton propellant. Results suggest that to use the proposed thruster performance model as an aid in thruster design the performance may be described in terms of four thruster configuration dependent constants and two operating parameters.