Channel Wall Erosion Modeling of a SPT-Type Hall Thruster

Abstract

Channel wall erosion of a 500 W class SPT-type Hall thruster was computed by using a 2D3V Fully Kinetic Particle-In-Cell Direct Simulation Monte Carlo model. Electrons are treated as particles and their trajectories are directly calculated in order to achieve self-consistent simulation. Compared with previous studies, the calculation acceleration technique of artificial electric permittivity was not implemented to avoid change of physics. In addition, the BN channel wall was included into the calculation domain to improve the wall sheath calculation for accurate wall erosion prediction. The calculation results of both case “without BN wall” and case “with BN wall” are presented and compared with the experimental data. Better agreement was achieved by the new case “with BN wall” rather than the conventional case “without BN wall”, which indicates the importance of calculating the electric field within the insulator wall.