Effects of Thruster Length on MPD Flows

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Numerical simulations of steady one-dimensional flows in self-field magnetoplasmadynamic (MPD) thrusters which are different in length are performed taking thermal and ionization nonequilibrium into account. The model used includes the electron energy and ionization rate equations. It is found that : 1) Under a fixed total discharge current, the tendency of thermal nonequilibrium between the electron temperature T_e and the heavy particle temperature T_g becomes strong as the thruster length is decreased. The promotion of nonequilibrium in the case of short thruster is due to the high rate of input power into the electron gas, caused by high current density, which is not transferred smoothly to the heavy particle gas. 2) In most parts of thrusters, the flowing gas is in the state of ionization nonequilibrium. The equilibrium value calculated based on Saha equation is very near to 1,except the parts where the electron temperature is low enough. 3) The increase of thruster length does not work for the suppression of the onset as far as it is related to back-EMF. 4) A long thruster has low discharge voltage, high thrust, and high thrust efficiency under a fixed discharge current. The high thrust efficiency in the case of the long thruster can be estimated generally as follows : the magnitude of magnetic Reynolds number, which is the ratio of the convected magnetic energy to Ohmic dissipation, evaluated using mean values of electrical conductivity σ and flow velocity u along the channel length is larger in the case of a long channel, and this fact means that the input power is utilized more efficiently into the kinetic energy of plasma flow through the magnetic field.
東海大学の論文

Effects of Thruster Length on MPD Flows

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