Hall effect thrusters (HETs) are an increasingly utilized proportion of electric propulsion devices due to their high thrust-to-power ratio. To enable an accessible research thruster, our team used inexpensive materials and simplified structures to fabricate the 44-mm-diameter Western Hall Thruster (WHT44). Anode flow, discharge voltage, magnet current, and cathode flow fraction (CFF) were independently swept while keeping all other parameters constant. Simultaneously, a Faraday probe was used to test plume properties at a variety of polar coordinate distances, and an oscilloscope was used to capture discharge oscillation behavior. Plasma plume divergence angle at a fixed probe distance of 4.5 thruster diameters increased with increasing anode flow, varying from 36.7∘ to 37.4∘. Moreover, divergence angle decreased with increasing discharge voltage, magnet current, and CFF, by 0.3∘, 0.2∘, and 8∘, respectively, over the span of the swept parameters. Generally, the thruster exhibited a strong oscillation near 90 kHz, which is higher than a similarly sized HET (20–60 kHz). The WHT44 noise frequency spectra became more broadband and the amplitude increased at a CFF of less than 1.5% and greater than 26%. Only the low flow and low voltage operating conditions showed a quiescent sinusoidal discharge current; otherwise, the discharge current probability distribution was Gaussian. This work demonstrates that the WHT44 thruster, designed for simplicity of fabrication, is a viable tool for research and academic purposes.
A retarding potential energy analyzer was used to obtain temporally resolved ion energy distribution functions (IEDFs) of a flowing laboratory plasma. The plasma of time varying ion energy was generated at 1 and 20 kHz using a commercial gridded ion source and modulated using a wideband power amplifier. Three plasma energy modulation setpoints were tested, and their IEDFs were reconstructed. This method leverages high-speed, low-noise instrumentation to obtain fast collector current measurements at discrete retarding bias levels, recombining them in the time domain using two data fusion techniques. The first method is an empirical transfer function, which determines the linear ratio of complex coefficients in Fourier space. The second method, shadow manifold interpolation, reconstructs the IEDFs point-by-point by comparing input and output datasets in a multi-dimensional phase space. Reconstructed IEDFs from the two methods are presented and compared. The two analysis methods show very good agreement.
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