Search

The electrical environment of a ground vacuum testing chamber creates facility effects for gridded ion thrusters. For example, it is well known that the plume from the thruster generates current paths that are very different from what occurs in space, and the neutralization of this plume is also different. For reasons such as this, it is important to clarify how the experimental testing environment affects plasma flows, but understanding this effect solely through ground experiments is difficult. To that end, this study utilizes particle-in-cell and direct simulation Monte Carlo methods to simulate xenon beam ions and electrons emitted from a neutralizer. First, we compare simulations conducted within the chamber to those conducted in space, demonstrating that grounded chamber walls increase the electric potential and electron temperature. Next, we investigate the impact of the neutralizer's position and the background pressure on the plume in the vacuum chamber. We find that as the neutralizer position moves closer to the location of maximum potential, more electrons are extracted, resulting in increased neutralization of the plume. We also observe that high background pressure generates slow charge-exchange ions, creating ion sheaths on the side walls that alter ion current paths. Finally, we discuss how the potential at the thruster and neutralizer exits affects the plume. The relative potential of the neutralizer to the vacuum chamber wall is observed to significantly influence the behavior of the electrons, thereby altering the degree of plume neutralization. These findings are shown to be consistent with experimental results in the literature and demonstrate the promise of high-performance simulation.

Gridded ion thrusters are tested in ground vacuum chambers to verify their performance when deployed in space. However, the presence of high background pressure and conductive walls in the chamber leads to facility effects that increase uncertainty in the performance of the thruster in space. To address this issue, this study utilizes a fully kinetic simulation to investigate the facility effects on the thruster plume. The in-chamber condition shows a downstream neutral particle density 100 times larger than the in-space case due to ion neutralization at the wall and limited vacuum pump capability, resulting in a significant difference in the density and distribution of charge-exchange ions. The flux, energy, and angle of charge-exchange ions incident on the chamber wall are found to be altered by the electron sheath, which can only be simulated by the fully kinetic approach, as opposed to the conventionally used quasi-neutral Boltzmann approach. We also examine the effect of backsputtering, another important facility effect, and find that it does not necessarily require a fully kinetic simulation as the incident flux and energy of the sampled charge-exchange ion are negligibly small. Finally, we demonstrate that the carbon deposition rate on the thruster is significantly influenced by the angular dependence of the sputtered carbon, with a nearly 50% effect.