Related papers: Understanding In-Chamber Plasma Behavior Using a D…
The electrical environment of a ground vacuum testing chamber creates facility effects for gridded ion thrusters. For example, it is well known that the plume from the thruster generates current paths that are very different from what…
Gridded ion thrusters are tested in ground vacuum chambers to verify their performance when deployed in space. However, the presence of high background pressure and conductive walls in the chamber leads to facility effects that increase…
The dynamics of the neutral atoms in Hall thrusters affect several plasma processes, from the ionization to the electrons' mobility. In the context of Hall thruster's particle-in-cell (PIC) modeling, the neutrals are often treated…
This work studies the fundamental plasma processes involved in the neutralization of an ion beam's space-charge by electrons emitted by a filament using Particle-in-Cell simulations. While filament neutralization is economical, previous…
To fully characterize electron drift instability, a critical phenomenon governing electron transport in Hall thrusters, large-scale three-dimensional (3D) particle-in-cell (PIC) simulations are essential, as the instability inherently…
Producing a dense background plasma for neutralization purposes is experimentally difficult and requires a large amount of energy. We show that even an underdense background plasma with a small relative density can achieve high…
High-power magnetically shielded Hall thrusters have recently emerged to meet the needs of the next-generation space missions. Even though a few such thrusters are currently undergoing their late-stage development campaigns, many unanswered…
This paper is a simulation based investigation of the effect of elastic collisions and effectively elastic-like excitation collisions between electrons and background neutrals on the dynamics of a cylindrically trapped electron cloud that…
We report on the experimental characterization of the RIT-2.5 radiofrequency ion thruster, complemented by particle-in-cell (PIC) simulations to establish correlations between plasma parameters and extracted beam properties. The thruster…
The advent of high-power Hall thrusters and the increasing interest towards their use as a primary propulsion system for various missions have given a new boost to the efforts aiming at self-consistent predictive modeling of this thruster…
Ion beam charge neutralization by electron injection is a complex kinetic process. Recent experiments show that resulting self-potential of the beam after neutralization by plasma could be much lower than the temperature of plasma electrons…
A careful study of plasma-material interactions is essential to understand and improve the operation of devices where plasma contacts a wall. Key contributions of this work include (i) novel continuum kinetic algorithms with novel boundary…
A fully kinetic 2D axisymmetric Particle-in-Cell (PIC) model is used to examine the effects of background facility pressure on the plasma transport and propulsive efficiency of magnetic nozzles. Simulations are performed for a low-power…
Plasma simulations are powerful tools for understanding fundamental plasma science phenomena and for process optimization in applications. To ensure their quantitative accuracy, they must be validated against experiments. In this work, such…
The Particle-in-Cell (PIC) method was used to study two different ion thruster concepts - Stationary Plasma Thrusters (SPT) and High Efficiency Multistage Plasma Thrusters (HEMP-T), in particular the plasma properties in the discharge…
Laboratory plasmas in open magnetic geometries can be found in many different applications such as (1) Scrape-Of-Layer (SOL) and divertor regions in toroidal confinement fusion devices (\approx1-10^2\hspace{1mm}\mathrm{eV}), (2) linear…
Particle transport, acceleration and energisation are phenomena of major importance for both space and laboratory plasmas. Despite years of study, an accurate theoretical description of these effects is still lacking. Validating models with…
We employ a particle-in-cell Monte Carlo collision/particle-particle particle-mesh (PIC-MCC/PPPM) simulation to study the plasma flow around and the charge distribution of a three-dimensional dust cluster in the sheath of a low-pressure rf…
Kinetic plasma processes, such as magnetic reconnection, collisionless shocks, and turbulence, are fundamental to the dynamics of astrophysical and laboratory plasmas. Simulating these processes often requires particle-in-cell (PIC)…
We present a new multi-fluid, multi-temperature plasma solver with adaptive Cartesian mesh (ACM) based on a full-Newton (non-linear, implicit) scheme for collisional low-temperature plasma. The particle transport is described using the…