Session 7P - Plasma Applications and Plasma Technology.
POSTER session, Thursday morning, November 14
Exhibit Hall - Concourse Level, Adam's Mark
A plasma accelerator is a device that uses a combination of electric and magentic fields to provide the forces needed to accelerate the working fluid. One of the main uses of plasma accelerators is in space propulsion where the high velocity expulsion of plasma leads to high specific impulses. In this paper we present the results of a computer simulation of a particular class of plasma accelerators, the Hall current ion thruster. A Hall current ion thruster uses radial magnetic fields to maintain a high voltage between the anode and the cathode. Ions generated in the cylindrical channel are accelerated downstream to produce thrust. Electrons are trapped in closed drift paths, thus avoiding large sources and sinks [due to E \times B drift]. For our simulation we used a new implicit, approximate non-ideal MHD Riemann solver, curently under development at the Aero and Astro Department. Since our code is still under development we are validating the results of our simulation against experimental results.