Determining the efficiency of a plasma thruster with closed electron drift

Abstract

We propose a new method for the analysis of the efficiency of ion generation and acceleration, which can be used to determine the ion current in a plasma accelerator (thruster) with closed electron drift. The method is based on the measurement of the energy and angular distributions of ions in the plasma jet, the discharge power, and the jet thrust. The laws of variation of the plasma thruster efficiency as a function of the discharge voltage in the interval of 300–1000 V have been studied.