An Investigation of Factors Involved in Hall Thruster Wall Erosion Modeling

A hydrodynamic description of the plasma flow within a SPT-100 type Hall thruster is used to study the erosion of the channel walls over time. The simulation of thousands of hours of erosion is performed on the order of tens of minutes of computation time. The calculated erosion matches satisfactorily against experimental data, especially the erosion at the exit plane. The eects of scattering collisions, ion velocity distributions, sputtering threshold energy, sputter yield curve fits, and potential drop within the thruster on the erosion are examined. While all of the above do aect erosion rates, the semi-empirical sputter yield curve fits, especially at the low ion energies prevalent in Hall thrusters, play the largest role in influencing the simulated erosion of the channel walls.

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