Ion Thruster Based Propulsion

Systems
EE672: Satellite Communication Systems

Hamood Khan, g200503210

EE Department | KFUPM19 December 2014
 1Contents
1 Contents..............................................................................................................................1

4 2 List of Figures......................................................................................................................2

3 Introduction........................................................................................................................3

4 Plasmas and Ions................................................................................................................4

5 Recent History of Electric Rockets and Ion Propulsion......................................................5

8 6 The Rocket Equation...........................................................................................................6

7 Ion thruster Structure and Functioning..............................................................................8

7.1 Rocket performance and thrust density...................................................................10

8 The Hall Thruster: Improvement over the Ion Drive........................................................11

12 8.1 Future Research into Hall Thruster Systems.............................................................12

9 Magnetoplasmadynamic Thrusters: The future of plasma engines.................................13

9.1 State of MPDT Research............................................................................................14

10 Future of Ion Propulsion Technology...............................................................................15

16 11 References........................................................................................................................15

1
 2List of Figures
20 Figure 1 Schematic of a Ion Thruster.........................................................................................9

Figure 2 Cross section of the Hall Thruster..............................................................................12

Figure 3 Schematic of a Magnetoplasmadynamic Thruster (MPDT).......................................13

2
24 3Introduction
Ion thrusters have been the focus of most science fiction movies, novels and magazines.

They work by accelerating charged particles out of a space vessel through the use of

electrostatic or electromagnetic fields. The sight of a large space ship zooming through the

28 dead of space with a trail of powerful light colored exhaust from its engines is a familiar. The

reality is a bit different from this imagined scenario. Ion thrusters are much smaller than

their cinematic counterparts and have very low acceleration rates (taking months to reach

top speeds). But one thing is true: the ion thruster engines are the technological solution to

32 the problem of deep space travel, much like in fiction.

What separates ion propulsion from traditional chemical rockets is its efficient use of fuel.

For the same amount of fuel, the ion propulsion gives a greater final velocity than a

chemical engine, owing to greater exhaust velocities of the propellant. All this is codified in

36 the celebrated rocket engine used by rocket scientists, as will be presented later on. High

exhaust velocities lead to reduced total propellant/fuel burden and corresponding low

launch mass of space vessels. The fact is that ion propulsion offers the farthest, cheapest

and fastest travel in space than any other competing propulsion technology currently

40 known. Although the force that an ion thruster exerts on a space vessel is equal to the

weight of a paper, the ultimate top speed is far greater than a chemical rocket. This is also

concurrent with utilizing a lesser mass of fuel. The acceleration phase is almost months,

making ion propulsion the fabled tortoise which always wins a marathon race with its slow

44 and steady pace as opposed to the intermittent sprints of the hare.

3
 In this report we will give a brief history of ion propulsion, the basic working of an ion

thruster, different types of ion thrusters in use, current missions that utilize these thrusters

and future of enhancements that are being applied to further improve the performance ion

48 propulsion technology.

4Plasmas and Ions

Ions are charged particles. They are positively or negatively charged atoms or molecules

with some of their valence electrons ripped off (positive charge) or extra electrons added

52 (negative charge). The process of creating ions is called ionization. A plasma is a cloud of gas

in which some or most of the atoms/molecules are ionized. Plasma is classified as the fourth

state of matter (in addition to solid, liquid and gas). Plasmas can created by heating a gas to

very high temperature, passing an electric current of charged particles (electric arc) through

56 it or even heating it to RF energy. They have many properties similar to an inert gas, but

they can carry electric currents (they are a better conductor than copper). Plasmas are the

basic element in any ion thruster engine. Electrostatic or Electromagnetic fields are used to

exert force to push the ions in a plasma out of the vessel’s body to generate propulsive

60 force. Fluorescent light bulbs furnish a common day example of plasmas.

The standard method of plasma creation is electron bombardment. High energy electrons

collide with the inert molecules of an inert gas hitting the outer shell electrons and

producing one positive ion and two negative charged particles. The other method being

64 researched is a combination heating with high frequency waves (microwaves) and a

magnetic field. This method is called Electron Cyclotron Resonance (ECR) and is being

developed at NASA.

4
 5Recent History of Electric Rockets and Ion
68 Propulsion
All though Ion thruster engines have only recently become a reality, they have been in the

making for a long time. Ion thrusters fall under the broad category of Electric Propulsion (EP)

systems. One of the pioneers of modern rocket design, Robert H. Goddard, was himself the

72 originator of the basic idea of EP. He speculated that charged particles could be accerlated

in electromagnetic fields to produce thrust force for space flight. Goddard’s Russian

counterpart, Konstantin Tsiolkovskiy (also credited for first deriving the rocket equation)

proposed similar ideas as early as 1911. Other early visionaries of EP were the German

76 Hermann Oberth in 1929 and the British team of Shepherd and Clearver in 1949. Probably

the first systematic study of electric propulsion was carried by the late Ernst Stuhlinger (he a

member of Wernher von Braun’s famed team of German rocket scientists). Stuhlinger

transformed the theory of electric propulsion into engineering reality in the 1950s.

80 It was the US space program in the late 1960’s that brought electric propulsion into the

sharp focus of organized and intense research effort. In its early phase, engineers drew

heavily on past knowledge and experience in other areas of physical science that dealt with

electro thermal, electrostatic and electromagnetic processes, for example, arc-heated wind

84 tunnels, welding practice, cathode ray tubes and mass-spectrometry, rail guns and magneto

hydrodynamics. Gradually these disparate technologies were fused to develop viable

thruster systems.

The first electric rocket was built by engineers at the NASA Glenn Research Center, known

88 as the resistojet (in which a propellant was resistively heated and allowed to expand to

generate thrust). It made a suborbital flight in 1964 onboard the Space Electric Rocket Test

5
 1, operating for half an hour before falling back to Earth. Elsewhere, researchers in the then

Soviet Union were working independently on electric rockets, eventually developing the Hall

92 thruster. The Hall thruster was subsequently selected in 1970s for attitude control and orbit

keeping for geosynchronous satellites by the Soviets.

Following a significant number of experimental flight tests, electric propulsion entered

commercial application in the early 1980s. In 1999 NASA’s Deep Space 1 demonstrated the

96 first use of an ion drive engine that propelled a spacecraft out of earth’s gravity. The number

of electrically propelled spacecraft has gone from a few in the 1960s to multiple of tens in

the 1970s and 1980s and reached in the hundreds in the late 1990s. The recent research

effort is on miniaturization in size and power of the engines. The idea is to go for low power

100 (<100 W), so that EP can be applied to micro-spacecraft. The other extreme trend is to go

for higher power applications (greater than 100 kW) to cater for large cargo and manned

missions to planets in the outer solar system.

6The Rocket Equation

104 The main reason through which ion thrusters derive their applicability is the dynamics of the

rocket equation. Consider a rocket of total mass m travelling at a velocityv. Newton’s law of

motion gives the net force on the system (rocket plus fuel) as:

d d d
F=
dt ( )
( mv )¿
dt
m v e + m v¿ ṁ v e + m v̇
dt

108 Here v e is the exhaust thrust velocity and v̇ is the rockets acceleration. Note that as fueul is

ejected out of the rocket, the total mass m is a changes with time. Conservation of

momentum yields F=0 and so:

6
 ṁ v e =−m v̇

112 Integrating the above equation yields:

mi
∆ v=v e ln (1)
mf

Or equivalently:

m f −∆ v/ v e
=e (2)
mi

116 Here m i is the initial mass and m f is the final mass of the rocket at the end of the mission.

∆ v or “delta-v” is the change in the rocket’s velocity during the mission. Delta v corresponds

to the energy that a craft has to expend in order to execute a space maneuver. For long

missions the required delta-v is large. To accommodate for large delta v’s we have (from

120 equation (1)) two control variables: either low final mass relative to initial mass (which

means a large amount of fuel to be ejected) or high exhaust velocities, v e. Chemical rockets

have low exhaust velocities (3-4 km/sec). This feature alone makes them troublesome to

use. The exponential dependence of the initial to final mass ratio of the rocket on delta-v

124 dictates that as delta-v requirement grows mass fraction of fuel increases dramatically,

leaving no space in the rocket for anything else other than fuel.

Here are a few examples to consider: To travel to Mars from low-Earth orbit requires a

delta-v of 4.5 km/s. The rocket equation says that a conventional chemical rocket requires

128 that about 2/3 of the spacecraft’s mass should be propellant to execute the mission. For

longer missions such as travel to planets in the outer solar system the delta v requirement

can be as high as 70 km/s. In that case, chemical rockets would need to have 99 percent of

their mass to be fuel. The configuration would be useless for practical purposes. Attempts to

7
132 increase the exhaust speeds of chemical rockets have proven to be difficult, because it

requires ultra-combustion temperatures and pressures both of which are difficult to achieve

because of the limited amount of energy that is released in chemical reactions and because

of the melting temperature of the rocket walls. Ion propulsion systems circumvent this

136 problem by offering very high exhaust speeds.

7Ion thruster Structure and Functioning

An Ion propulsion system has the following parts:

1. The power source: it is any source power, (e.g., solar or nuclear) that is used to

140 energize the electrostatic/electromagnetic fields in the ion thruster. A solar electric

propulsion system uses solar cells for power generation, while a nuclear electric

propulsion system uses nuclear heat source coupled to an electric generator.

2. Power processing unit (PPU): It converts the power generated by the power source

144 into power required by the various components of the ion thruster. This includes

high voltages required by the ion “optics” and discharge chamber and high currents

required for hollow shell cathodes.

3. Propellant management system (PMS): This unit controls the supply of propellant

148 from the propellant tank to the thrust chamber and hollow cathode. Modern PMS

systems have no moving parts.

4. Control computer: This is the supervisory control unit for the entire system. It

controls and monitors the performance of the system.

152 5. Ion thruster: This is the main unit through which the propellant passes to generate

thrust.

8
 Figure 1 Schematic of a Ion Thruster

156 Ion engines are able to achieve exhaust velocities from 20 to 50 km/s. In its most common

form the ion engine is a cylinder that is set longitudinally. The most commonly used

propellant is xenon. Xenon flows from the propellant tank into an ionization chamber where

an electromagnetic field tiers electrons off the xenon gas atoms to create a plasma. The

160 positive ions of this plasma are accelerated to high speeds through an electric field that is

applied between two electrode grids called accelerator grids. Each positive ion is pulled

towards the back of the thruster by the negatively charged electrodes and leaves the body

of the rocket imparting thrust to it. The positive ions in the exhaust leave the spacecraft

164 with a net negative charge, which if not neutralized would pull the expelled ions back to the

spacecraft and thus cancel the generated thrust. A device called neutralizer is used to avoid

this problem. A neutralizer is an external electron source (e.g., an electron gun) that injects

electrons in the positive ion stream of exhaust to neutralize it.

168 Currently there are hundreds of ion drives operating on commercial spacecraft—the most

common being geostationary satellites. They use ion thrusters for orbital station keeping

9
 and attitude control. Ion thrusters have been selected for such missions because they save

millions of dollars in launching large a mass of fuel required by chemical rockets. As

172 mentioned before Deep Space 1 was the world’s first spacecraft using electric propulsion

and escaping Earth’s gravity from orbit. The probe was accelerated by 4.3 km/s while

consuming only 74 kg of xenon fuel. Recently, Dawn, another deep space mission broke that

record by adding 10 km/s to its velocity.

176 7.1 Rocket performance and thrust density

An ion drive rocket performance depends on two key parameters: 1) speed of the exhaust

particles and 2) the density of thrust. Thrust density is defined as the amount of force a

rocket produces per unit cross section area of its exhaust opening. The greater the thrust

180 density the higher the efficiency of the engine.

Ion drive engines suffer from an impediment called space-charge limitation. Space-charge

reduces their thrust density. It is caused as the positive ions move to the aft electric grid and

eventually develop a charged layer around it. This charge build up limits the strength of the

184 attainable electric field used to accelerate the plasma. It is this space-charge that limits the

force generated by Deep Space 1, for example, to the weight of a paper. Because of the tiny

thrusting force, typically an acceleration period of months is required for these engines to

achieve the delta-v they are capable of. Since the space is vacuum, there is no drag force to

188 counter this tiny force that is applied for very long time. The result is higher top speed than

a chemical rocket, which burns out quickly.

10
 8The Hall Thruster: Improvement over the
Ion Drive
192 To overcome the space-charge limitations of the ion drive, the Hall thruster was developed

by the Soviets over many decades. Hall thrusters avoid the space-charge problem by

propelling both entire plasma (not just the positive ions) out of the rocket exhaust.

The system relies on a fundamental effect discovered in 1879 by Edwin H. Hall. Hall

196 discovered this effect before the discovery of electrons. He showed that if in a conductor

there are mutually perpendicular electric and magnetic field then a current perpendicular to

both the fields flows in the conductor. This current is called the Hall current.

The Hall thruster works as follows. Plasma is produced when an electric discharge between

200 an internal positive anode and an external cathode rips through the neutral gas inside the

device chamber. The resulting plasma is then accelerated through the engine exhaust under

the influence of Lorentz force given by:

F=q (E+ v × B)

204 Her F is the Lorentz force, q is the electrostatic charge on a particle, E is the electrostatic

field strength, v is the velocity of the charged particle and B is the magnetic field strength.

The Lorentz results from the interaction of an applied radial magnetic field and the Hall

current which flows in a circular fashion around the central anode and is caused by the

208 mutually perpendicular electric and magnetic fields. The resulting exhaust velocities range

from 10 to 50 km/sec. As mentioned before, Hall thrusters circumvent the build of space-

charge buildup by propelling the entire plasma (positive ions and negative electrons) out of

the exhaust. The result is that the thrust density of Hall thrusters is an order of magnitude

11
212 larger than that of ion drives. This gives a higher delta-v. The European Space Agency’s

SMART-1 spacecraft mission to the moon was powered by a Hall thruster.

Fi
gure 2 Cross section of the Hall Thruster

216

8.1 Future Research into Hall Thruster Systems

The basic aspects of Hall thrusters that are being investigated is how to generate higher

amounts of power and how to increase their lifespan to cover multiple years of continuous

220 operation. Some recent work involves planting segmented electrodes in the walls of a Hall

thruster. These electrodes shape the internal electrostatic field to focus the plasma exhaust

into a narrow exhaust beam. It also eliminates the useless non-axial component of thrust

and improves the system lifetime by protecting the walls of the rocket from the corrosive

224 effect of hot plasma beams. Similar effects have also been achieved using magnetic fields.

12
 Research teams at Stanford have lined the internal walls of the rocket with polycrystalline

diamond to increase its lifetime. This should eventually make the use of Hall thrusters

suitable for deep space travel.

228 9Magnetoplasmadynamic Thrusters: The

future of plasma engines.

Figure 3 Schematic of a Magnetoplasmadynamic Thruster (MPDT)

232

13
 Hall thrusters work well only when the plasma density in the thruster chamber is low

enough for the magnetic field to dominate the current flow. An obvious method to further

raise the density of plasma propulsion is increase the total amount of plasma that is

236 accelerated in the engine. That would lead to increase plasma density in the Hall thruster

and the electrons would collide more frequently with atoms and ions, limiting the Hall

current needed for acceleration.

Magnetoplasmadynamic thrusters are an alternative solution to the problem of increasing

240 plasma density. Instead of using the Hall current it uses the current that is mostly aligned

with electric field. This current is less susceptible to disruption by atomic collision than the

Hall current.

As shown in figure 3. A single MPDT consists of a central cathode sitting within a large

244 cylindrical anode. A gas, typically lithium, is pumped into the annular space between the

cathode and the anode. An electric current flowing radially from the cathode to the anode

ionizes the gas. The current induces an azimuthal magnetic field that circles the central

cathode. The azimuthal magnetic field interacts with the same current that produces to

248 provide an axial, thrust producing Lorentz force.

An MPD engine is the size of an average house bucket but can process a million watts of

electric power from a solar or nuclear source, which is significantly larger than the maximum

power handling capability of a Hall thruster. Current MPDT technology offers exhaust

252 velocities up to 60 km/s.

14
 Another useful aspect of MPD thrusters is their ability to throttle the amount of thrust. By

varying the strength of the electric current or the supply rate of propellant to the ionization

chamber the overall thrust can be controlled. This allows for optimization of the spacecraft’s

256 trajectory as needed by the mission planner.

9.1 State of MPDT Research

There has been a lot of research activity in optimizing the performance of MPD thrusters

trying remove obstacles in achieving high performance and increased lifetimes. Issues like

260 plasma instabilities, internal power dissipation in plasmas and erosion of electrodes have

been vigorously investigated. This has led to novel engine design giving high performance

results. Various exotic propellants have been employed, like lithium or barium vapor. They

yield easy ionization, lower internal energy losses and lower temperatures of the cathode.

264 Liquid metal propellants have also been used. Other improvements include new cathode

design that have channels that interact how electric current interact with its surface has

resulted in less erosion of the cathode.

10 Future of Ion Propulsion Technology

268 So far the most advanced designs of Ion thrusters can give a delta-v of 100 km/s. While this

is not enough to take spacecraft to distant stars, it is sufficient to transport to outer planets

in relatively short times. One of the envisaged missions is a trip to Saturn’s largest moons—

Titan. Scientists believe that a long time ago Titan had an atmosphere that was similar to

272 Earth’s. Exploring Titan’s surface could reveal what chemical processes preceded life. With

chemical propulsion, missions to Titan would be impossible, especially with the requirement

of multiple gravity assists because no in-course propulsion. The trip would then requires

15
 years in completion. A probe fitted with a small plasma engine could change all that. The

276 future of ion propulsion seems promising and bright.

11 References
[1] A Critical History of Electric Propulsion: The First 50 Years (1906–1956). Edgar Y. Choueiri in

Journal of Propulsion and power, Vol. 20, No. 2, pages 193–203; 2004.

280 [2] Physics of Electric Propulsion. Robert G. Jahn. Dover Publications, 2006.

[3] Fundamentals of Electric Propulsion: Ion and Hall Thrusters. Dan M. Goebel and Ira Katz.

Wiley, 2008.

[4] Benefits of Nuclear Electric Propulsion for Outer Planet Exploration. G. Woodcock et al.

284 American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, 2002.

16