Power transfer efficiency in an air-breathing radio frequency ion thruster

doi:10.1088/1674-1056/ad426c

Abstract Due to a series of challenges such as low-orbit maintenance of satellites, the air-breathing electric propulsion has got widespread attention. Commonly, the radio frequency ion thruster is favored by low-orbit missions due to its high specific impulse and efficiency. In this paper, the power transfer efficiency of the radio frequency ion thruster with different gas compositions is studied experimentally, which is obtained by measuring the radio frequency power and current of the antenna coil with and without discharge operation. The results show that increasing the turns of antenna coils can effectively improve the radio frequency power transfer efficiency, which is due to the improvement of $Q$ factor. In pure N$_{2}$ discharge, with the increase of radio frequency power, the radio frequency power transfer efficiency first rises rapidly and then exhibits a less steep increasing trend. The radio frequency power transfer efficiency increases with the increase of gas pressure at relatively high power, while declines rapidly at relatively low power. In N$_{2}$/O$_{2}$ discharge, increasing the N$_{2}$ content at high power can improve the radio frequency power transfer efficiency, but the opposite was observed at low power. In order to give a better understanding of these trends, an analytic solution in limit cases is utilized, and a Langmuir probe was employed to measure the electron density. It is found that the evolution of radio frequency power transfer efficiency can be well explained by the variation of plasma resistance, which is related to the electron density and the effective electron collision frequency.

Keywords: radio frequency ion thruster inductively coupled plasma power transfer efficiency analytic solution

Received: 03 March 2024
Revised: 09 April 2024
Accepted manuscript online: 24 April 2024

PACS:	52.25.Jm	(Ionization of plasmas)
	52.27.Cm	(Multicomponent and negative-ion plasmas)
	52.50.Dg	(Plasma sources)

Fund: Project supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 12005031 and 12275041) and the Natural Science Fund from the Interdisciplinary Project of Dalian University (Grant No. DLUXK-2023-QN-001).

Corresponding Authors: Hong Li, Fei Gao
E-mail: lihong10@dlu.edu.cn;fgao@dlut.edu.cn

Cite this article:

Gao-Huang Huang(黄高煌), Hong Li(李宏), Fei Gao(高飞), and You-Nian Wang(王友年) Power transfer efficiency in an air-breathing radio frequency ion thruster 2024 Chin. Phys. B 33 075201

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Power transfer efficiency in an air-breathing radio frequency ion thruster

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