Plasma Engineering

5.2.8.3 Example of TAL simulation: high-power Bismuth TAL

In this section, we describe the simulation of a particular TAL design that uses Bismuth as the propellant. The Bismuth thruster was originally developed in the 1960s in the former USSR. It was demonstrated that specific impulse in the range of 2000–5000 s at power levels of 10–34 kW can be achieved. This thruster has a two-stage configuration in order to separate the ion production and acceleration zones. In this analysis, we will consider only the second stage. In particular, plasma density is used as a parameter. The simulations correspond to the following case: mass flow rate is 20 mg/s, magnetic field is uniform and equals 0.2 T. In this case, the calculated discharge current is ...