Feasibility study of low power helicon thruster

Abastract Helicon thrusters have been recently considered a possible new electric propulsion system thanks to the acceleration mechanism called “current free double layer “ which allows specific impulse up to 1300 s applying Argon and 4000 s applying hydrogen. Although the primary interest of this technology was always regarding primary propulsion , on this paper is explored the possibility of using helicon thruster for secondary propulsion e.g. station keeping or attitude control onboard of satellite from mini to telecommunication class. Such a thruster provides several advantage respect to the electric propulsion system currently applied: (i) is build up by very few components , thus is reliable, (ii) thrust and power can be modulated , thus it is versatile, (iii) plasma interact marginally with the thruster structure, thus erosion is not an issue, (IV) is light and compact. The numerical analysis have been conducted through a combination of 1-D and 2-D numerical code. A specific 1D code named PPDL has been developed to simulate potential drop acceleration. Main feature of the code are: hybrid Boltzmann electron/drift -kinetic ion, inclusion of dominant 2-D effects, high computational efficiency thorough implicit non linear Boltzmann solver. The 2-D code XOOPIC is free available from Berkeley University. Limitations of XOOPIC are no floating boundary condition implemented on the electrostatic solver and long computational time. The combined approach resulted very useful since the 1-D code has been used to screen many different experimental conditions and to identify the right boundary condition. 2-D code has been then used to refine 1-D results. The two models, combined with a global model specifically developed to simulate the plasma reaction inside the plasma source, have been finally run, through genetic algorithms to identify an optimal thrusters configuration in the 50 W power regimes.