Ezperimental Investigation of Microhollow Cathode Discharge for the Application to Micro Plasma Thrusters
The rapid developments and applications of micro-satellites urgently need new types of microthrusters. A possibility for the advanced microthrusters would be to make use of the microplasma technology. Microhollow cathode discharges (MHCDs) are high pressure, non-equilibrium gas discharges inside the few hundreds of diameter hole drilled in a metal-dielectric-metal sandwich. A stable discharge can be produced and sustained at high pressure in this device with relative low voltage (several hundreds volts) or input power (several hundreds of milliwatts). As to MHCD, the discharge characteristic was analyzed, and the gas temperature determined from the emission spectroscopy with traces of nitrogen added. The recorded nitrogen emission spectra are compared to the simulated ones to deduce the rotational distributions, hense the gas temperature. In argon discharges, the electron density was also evaluated through the Stark broadening of the Balmer Hβ line from hydrogen present as trace impurity in the gas. The electron density is in the order of 1014 cm-3 while the gas temperature increases with the increasing gas pressure and the discharge current and can reach 1000K in the stable glow regime. The results show that the extremely small dimensions of the MHCD combining with relative intense and controllable gas heating can be applied as a new micro electro-thermal thruster for micro-satellite propulsion. Due to the heating of the propellant gas in the microdischarge plasma and its expansion through the micro-nozzle, the performance of specific impulse and thrust of the microplasma thruster using the MHCD will be higher than the conventional cold gas microthrusters.
Microhollow cathode discharge (MHCD) electric propulsion microthruster Optical Emission Spectroscopy (OES)
XIA Guang-qing MAO Gen-wang Nader Sadeghi
College of Astronautics, Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xian 710072, PR China LSP, Université Joseph Fourier & CNRS, 38041 Grenoble, France
国际会议
北京
英文
1-5
2008-10-23（万方平台首次上网日期，不代表论文的发表时间）