Projects & Research
Io-1
Io-1 was the first thruster developed by the Southampton University Electric Propulsion team and the foundational technology from which all of our thrusters have been developed. This 250W thruster was the first to be developed by undergraduate students as part of a society project, and it has taught us valuable skills providing us with knowledge we are using to develop our next thrusters. It was operating on Krypton gas at the David Fearne Electric Propulsion Laboratory, at the University of Southampton.
The thruster was unable to operate steadily, and so we were unable to acquire hard data points. Despite this, we can still infer certain aspects of its performance. Based on prior magnetic field tests, the magnetic field is lopsided, resulting in a non ideal field topology, since for optimum performance, the field should be mostly radial. This directly resulted in the plume being quite divergent, as shown in Figure 1, likely causing many ions to have significant non-axial components in their velocities and not contributing to the overall thrust of the engine. It can also be seen that the plasma appears very dense close to the exit plane of the thruster, indicating that most of the ionisation and acceleration is occurring closer to the exit plane, which could explain instabilities and poor performance.
Io-2
Io-2 is the natural successor to Io-1, building upon its legacy. Io-2 is a 1kW Argon Hall-Effect thruster, with an attempt at magnetic shielding to extend the lifetime of the thruster. The inital design parameters of Io-2 is shown in Table 1, which ultimatly dictated many subsequent desing decisions. The final design took inspiration from historic Hall-Effect thrusters and through iterative simulations for optimal performance. A thorough report on the design process and all the issues was created and is downlaodable below. In the manufacturing stages, many challenges were faced including coil failures and breaks, rust, as well as general manufacturing faults. SUEP has included these in the report to help others learn and improve on all our faults. This will also serve as a useful reminder for our future projects and design decisions. Our test procedures our outlined and the future test results will be released once they have been completed.
| Parameter | Value |
|---|---|
| Nominal Discharge Power | 1000W |
| Nominal Discharge Voltage | 300V |
| Propellant | Argon |
| Project Budget | £1600 |
Hall Effect Thruster Database
Before working on the Zeus project, the SUEP team created a database of current and past Hall-effect thruster parameters and their performances. These parameters and performances are outlines in Table 2. We want to extend our database of information to anyone interested, which has allowed us to define key design parameters for our Zeus project. For example, Figure 7 shows how the database has been used to compare parameters such as thrust, and power to different HET fuel types. References to where the data was gathered has been provided within the database.
Please note that the information we have gathered was openly available online and we have provided references for each source. SUEP wishes to abide by any copyright laws, so please contact us if any data is yours and wish for it to be removed!
| Parameters | Symbols | Definitions |
|---|---|---|
| Mean Channel Diameter | d | The mid circle between the outside and inside diameter circles |
| Channel Width | h | The distance between the inside and outside diameters of the channel |
| Channel Length | L | The distance from the top of the anode to the exit plane of the thruster |
| Power | p | Total discharge power from the anode |
| Discharge Voltage | Ud | Total discharge voltage from the anode |
| Anode Mass Flow Rate | ṁ | Total anode mass flow rate input |
| Total Thrust | Thrust | Total thrust Produced |
| Specific Impulse | Isp | Fuel efficiency |
| Type of HET (e.g SPT, TAL) | Type | Configuration of hall thruster, can dramatically effect performance very important to not list incorrectly |
| Ionization Energy | Φ | The amount of energy taken to ionize one atom into a +1 ion |
| Atomic Mass | M | The mass of one atom of the propellant |
Zeus
Zeus is SUEP's most recent project, with the aim of being one of the first undergraduate student societies to create a Zinc solid fuel Hall-effect thruster. More updates are to happen soon!