Abstract
A self-field MPD thruster in its most basic form consists in a central cathode surrounded by a concentric anode. With this coaxial geometric shape is very difficult to use experimental techniques to visualize the plasma flow parameters. In the following paper a previously proposed numerical method for the ideal magnetohydrodynamics (MHD) equations is extended to deal with resistive MHD viscous flow. The numerical method is based on the well known PISO algorithm and makes use of the AUSM-MHD scheme for flux calculation. For validation three test cases will be addressed. We start with a resistive MHD problem, namely the Shercliff test case. The second and third test cases are standard 2D ideal MHD problems, these will be used to validate our method for complex interaction of MHD shocks. We will close this paper with some preliminary results for a quasi-bi-dimensional self-field magnetoplasmadynamic (MPD) thruster, where the effects of cathode length in the performance of the nozzle are analysed.
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