High Power Demonstration of a 100 kW Nested Hall Thruster System

Abstract

The XR-100 team successfully completed high power system testing of a Nested Hall Thruster system made up of the X3 Nested Hall Thruster, a modular Power Processing Unit, and a 5 valve Mass Flow Controller as the culmination of work performed under a NASA NextSTEP program. The test campaign attained several key records to date, including highest directly measured thrust of an electric propulsion (EP) string, highest demonstrated current of an EP string, and highest power operation of an EP string at thermal equilibrium published to date. Most importantly, the XR-100 system testing demonstrated that a 100 kW-class Nested Hall Thruster system has comparable performance and behavior to current state-of-the-art mid power Hall Thrusters, validating that the heritage technology can be scaled up to 100+ kW class. In addition to the outlined accomplishments and corresponding system demonstration, design improvements for future development and testing are discussed.

Physics of thermionic, orificed hollow cathodes: I. Theory and experimental validation

“…800 A of discharge current for a typical Hall-effect thruster (assuming an efficiency of 100%, a specific impulse of 2000 s, and xenon gas). Existing thrusters are starting to approach or exceed this power level [13][14][15]. To date, however, only cathodes that operate at low current (<20 A) have undergone life testing and the lifetime of high-current (>100 A) cathodes has only been estimated to be in the tens of kilo-hours (see figure 1).…”