Co-axial Micro-Cathode Arc Thruster (CA-uCAT) and Performance Characterization

Abstract

mCAT) named Co-axial Micro-Cathode Arc Thruster (CA-mCAT) has been designed. The behavior of the CAmCAT was studied and characterized in this paper. A half-ball shape Langmuir probe was employed to measure the total ion current over the thruster arc current. It is found that new thruster design (CA-mCAT) yields the transport eciency of around 45% without need in application magnetic eld, and this is close to the maximum ratio for mCAT when magnetic eld was utilized. To optimize the performance of CAmCAT , the magnetic eld eect on CAmCAT have been studied. Four assembled Langmuir probes were developed to characterize the rotation of the cathode spot as a result of an applied magnetic eld. It is found that an applied magnetic eld leads to an increase of cathode spots rotational speed. Also, the velocity of ions moving from the CA-mCAT cathode spots were measured using a set of grid probes along the path of the plasma plume expansion. It was found that the ion drift velocity had increased when magnetic eld increased (from 0mT up to 300mT). The average ion velocity increases with the increase of magnetic eld by factor of 2-3 up to about (5-6) 10 4 m /s with an applied magnetic eld strength of 300mT.