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Rocketry
Published in Jonathan Allday, Apollo in Perspective, 2019
NASA is currently developing the Lunar Orbital Platform-Gateway, a proposed space station in the vicinity of the Moon (see Section 9.4). The station will probably utilise the Advanced Electric Propulsion System (AEPS) currently under development by NASA and Aerojet Rocketdyne. The AEPS technology is slightly different from that of the Gridded Electrostatic Ion Thruster as the accelerating cathode consists of circulating electrons trapped by a combination of electric and magnetic fields. Hall Effect Thrusters of this type have been in use since 1971 when the Russians first launched one on a satellite. They have been used routinely for orbital insertion and station keeping ever since. The European Space Agency's 2003 Small Missions for Advanced Research in Technology-1 (SMART-1) spacecraft orbited the Moon for just under 3 years as a technology demonstrator and used a Hall effect thruster.
Nonchemical Rocket Engine
Published in D.P. Mishra, Fundamentals of Rocket Propulsion, 2017
Based on possible permutations of the electromagnetic concept, several types of electromagnetic thrusters have been designed and developed, but only a few have met the performance requirement, namely, efficiency, reliability, range of performance, and system compatibility for space applications. Of these, some of the advanced thrusters, namely, (1) magnetoplasmadynamic thruster (MPDT), (2) pulsed plasma thruster (PPT), and (3) the Hall effect thruster (HET) are discussed in the following.
Nature-Inspired Concepts for High-Power Electric Propulsion Systems
Published in Fusion Science and Technology, 2023
Among the problems that conventional high-power electric PSs may suffer from, several can be highlighted. First of all, modern high-power electric PSs are considered to consist of separately located thruster heads and power generation systems.[5,6] The separation requires the use of interconnected systems. Connection of the power generation stage and the high-power electric propulsion stage can lead to a significant power loss, especially in the case of PSs that operate at megawatt power levels, due to high current flows through the interconnected system.[6] For example, for a system consisting of a separate conventional thruster [for example, a Hall effect thruster (HET) with 60% efficiency] and power system, the power loss in the connecting lines reaches 94%. This loss varies from 3.4 to 16.5 MW; the lower limit is for a magnetohydrodynamic generator (MHDG) and the upper limit is for thermionic converters (TCs), depending on the energy converter used if the thruster requires a 1-MW power supply.
Development of Object-oriented PIC Code for Simulation of Plasma Flow Around a Satellite in Solar Corona
Published in International Journal of Computational Fluid Dynamics, 2021
Jorge Alberto García Pérez, Kojiro Suzuki
Regarding Hall Effect Thruster simulations, most of the simulations focus on the acceleration channel or the plume region. The simulations centred in the acceleration channel usually aim to examine the thruster performance as a whole, studying the relations between parameters such as the injection of neutrals, the current applied to the anode, the thrust produced, etc. To achieve these objectives the codes employed are usually based on kinetic, fluid or hybrid PIC-fluid descriptions on 1D or 2D meshes, since these are fast and reproduce with good accuracy the experimental results (Lentz and Martinez-Sanchez 1993; Fife 1995); full-PIC codes, on the other hand, are much slower, but since they do not necessarily assume quasi-neutrality and they are based on first principles, they are suitable for investigating more detailed phenomena inside the device (Szabo et al. 2013).