Improvement of Microwave Discharge Ion Thruster Using Antennas for Uniform and Dense Plasma Production

The dependency of thrust performance on thruster configurations such as antenna length, antenna height, number of antenna, magnetic field configuration, and microwave frequency, was investigated with the objective of improving the thrust performance of microwave discharge ion thruster using antennas for uniform and dense plasma production. The experimental results showed that there was an optimum length of the antennas, and it was 3/4 times the wave length of incident microwaves. The ion beam current reaches its maximum value when the antenna was set at 2mm downstream of an electron cyclotron resonance layer. There was an optimum number of the antennas. This is due to the tradeoff between the coupling of plasma with microwave and the surface recombination on the antenna. The expansion of ionization zone was made successfully by changing magnetic field configuration. In addition, the thrust performance was slightly improved with increase in incident microwave frequency from 2.45GHz to 4.2GHz. A value for the ion beam current with 2.45GHz is compensated by high electron number density and less magnetized ions for the disadvantage of small plasma number density. Overall, the propellant utilization efficiency, ion production cost, and estimated thrust were found to be 0.62, 300W/A and 6.2mN, respectively at mass flow rate of 0.22mg/s for xenon, ion beam voltage of 1,500V and 2.45GHz microwave incident power at 32W.