Numerical Analysis of MHD Accelerator with Non-Equilibrium Air Plasma

Magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) accelerator is proposed as a next generation propul- sion system. It can be used to increase the performance of a propulsion system. The objective of this study is to investigate the performance of MHD accelerator using non-equilibrium air plasma as working gas. In this study, the fundamental performance of MHD accelerator such as flow per- formance and electrical performance is evaluated at di®erent levels of applied magnetic field using 1-D numerical simulation. The numerical simulation is developed based on a set of di®erential equations with MHD approximation. To solve this set of di®erential equations the MacCormack scheme is used. A specified channel designed and developed at NASA Marshall Space Flight Cen- tre is used in the numerical simulation. The composition of the simulated air plasma consists of seven species, namely, N_2, N, O₂, O, NO, NO⁺, and e^- The performance of the non-equilibrium MHD accelerator is also compared with the equilibrium MHD accelerator.