Boeing Electron Dynamic Devices, Inc. (EDD) has designed and fabricated a breadboard version of a 6-kW power processing unit (PPU) for gridded ion thrusters. This breadboard PPU will be integrated with an engineering model 40-cm ion engine designed and tested at GRC. The results of our tests using resistive loads are reported in this paper. The PPU demonstrated efficiencies to date are higher than 95% for the beam supply and higher than 92% for the discharge supply at full power. Overall PPU efficiency is greater than 94% at full throttle settings.
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