CAMILA Hall Thruster: New Results

The paper is devoted to a continuation of experimental investigations of a CAMILA Hall thruster (HT) and optimization of its parameters. The CAMILA HT is a new low-power Hall thruster concept. In the paper, two versions of the CAMILA HT are discussed: a full CAMILA HT where a longitudinal magnetic field in an anode cavity is created by special anode coils and for the first time simplified CAMILA HT, in which in order to create a longitudinal component of the magnetic field in the cavity no additional magnetic coils are applied. Some features of physical processes in simplified CAMILA HT are considered. The magnetic system of simplified CAMILA HT is simpler and it consumes less power, but the anode efficiency of the full CAMILA HT is generally higher. However, an optimization of the magnetic field configuration, in order to make it closer to that in the full CAMILA HT without application of additional coils, carried out recently, allowed essentially increasing the efficiency. The following performance was attained: at discharge power of 198 W, the anode efficiency and specific impulse were 49.6 % and 1622 s, respectively. The expected life time is large than 4000 h. In the paper, the preliminary results of discharge current oscillations are presented. Increasing the longitudinal magnetic field in the anode cavity reduced amplitude of oscillations.