Numerical Simulation of a Water Propellant Pulsed Plasma Thruster

Abstract

Water, an al ternati ve propellant, was consi dered to be a key point to i mprove the performance of pulsed pl asma thruster(PPT). To date, the effecti veness of PPT using water propellant had been testified by experi mental methods. First of all, combined with the available Tefl on PPT numerical si mulation, computational model was set up for water propellant PPT. Then a comparison was made wi th the experi mental results from the Uni versity of Tokyo. It showed that big di fferences were existed between the experi mental results and the simulation results. The pri mary reason was that the operati on process was simulated as first order completel y i onization which was an i deal situation. Fi nally several cases were calcul ated to discover that every initial energy corres pondingly had a sufficient ablation mass. And different supplied mass coul d meet different tasks.