Effect of Charging Voltage of Energy Storage Capacitor on Performance of Ablative Pulsed Plasma Thruster

Abstract

Discharge energy of thruster is an important factor which can affect Ablative Pulsed Plasma Thruster system performance. The discharge characteristics, ablation characteristics of propellant and plasma movement characteristics of APPT at different initial voltages are systematically studied. By fitting and estimating APPT circuit parameters and system performance parameters under different initial voltages, the internal mechanism of influence of initial voltage change on thruster performance is obtained. The results show that with the increase of discharge voltage, the plasma velocity increases, the impulse bit, specific impulse and efficiency of the thruster all increase, and the system performance improves. But with the increase of voltage, efficiency of the system energy converse to discharge energy decreases, while the mass of the ablated propellant increases, the proportion of the ablated propellant which is effectively ionized and accelerated by Lorentz force decreases. This is not conducive to the performance improvement of thruster, it can be concluded that simply increasing the initial voltage of thruster has certain limitations on optimizing thruster performance.