Performance of a 4 cm iodine-fueled radio frequency ion thruster

Jinghua YANG (杨景华); Shaoxia JIA (贾少霞); Zhenhua ZHANG (张振华); Xinghua ZHANG (张兴华); Ting JIN (金婷); Long LI (李龙); Yong CAI (蔡勇); Jian CAI (蔡建)

doi:10.1088/2058-6272/ab891d

Plasma Science and Technology > 2020 > 22(9): 94006-094006. > DOI: 10.1088/2058-6272/ab891d

Jinghua YANG (杨景华), Shaoxia JIA (贾少霞), Zhenhua ZHANG (张振华), Xinghua ZHANG (张兴华), Ting JIN (金婷), Long LI (李龙), Yong CAI (蔡勇), Jian CAI (蔡建). Performance of a 4 cm iodine-fueled radio frequency ion thruster[J]. Plasma Science and Technology, 2020, 22(9): 94006-094006. DOI: 10.1088/2058-6272/ab891d

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Performance of a 4 cm iodine-fueled radio frequency ion thruster

¹ Institute of Microelectronics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100029, People's Republic of China
² Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Nanjing 210016, People's Republic of China
³ Suzhou Nano-Space Dynamics Technology Co. Ltd, Suzhou 215000, People's Republic of China

Funds: The financial support from National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 11805265) and Key Laboratory of Micro-Satellites, Chinese Academy of Sciences (No. KFKT201903) is gratefully acknowledged.

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Received Date: January 01, 2020
Revised Date: April 02, 2020
Accepted Date: April 13, 2020

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Abstract

Abstract

The performance of an iodine radio ion thruster with a 4 cm diameter (IRIT4) was studied experimentally in this paper. Regulation of the mass flow rates of the iodine propellant is achieved by using a temperature control method of the iodine reservoir. Performance of the thruster using iodine as propellants is obtained at different total thruster powers of 40.6–128.8 W, different grid voltages of 1000–1800 V and the iodine flow rate of 100 μg s⁻¹. Results show that thrust and specific impulse increase approximately linearly with the increasing total thruster power and the screen grid voltage. The thrust of 2.32 mN and the specific impulse of 2361 s are obtained at the nominal total thruster power of 95.8 W and the screen grid voltage of 1800 V. It is also indicated that performance of the iodine propellant is comparable to that of the xenon propellant; and a difference between them is that the iodine thrust is slightly higher than xenon when the total thruster power is more than 62 W. At the nominal 95.8 W total thruster power, the thrust values of them are 2.32 mN and 2.15 mN respectively, and the thrust-to-power ratios of them are 24.2 mN kW⁻¹ and 23.5 mN kW⁻¹, respectively.
- electric propulsion,
- iodine propellant,
- radio frequency ion propulsion

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References (14)

References

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Performance of a 4 cm iodine-fueled radio frequency ion thruster