Performance Evaluation of a Miniature Ion Thruster μ1 with a Unipolar and Bipolar Operation

This study shows the system performances of 10-W-class miniature ion thrusters designed for 50 kg small spacecraft. The remarkable feature is that the ion thruster system includes a miniature neutralizer and it has two operational modes with respect to the neutralization. One is a conventional method installing a miniature neutralizer and we call this as a unipolar ion thruster, contrasted with the following bipolar thruster. The other is to use multiple plasma sources and function of an each plasma source is selectable between an ion beam source and neutralizer. The thruster with this operation is referred as to a bipolar operation. In this study, we measured the performance of these thrusters and evaluated the system performance: thrust, total power consumption, and specific impulse. This evaluation includes power and propellant consumptions at the neutralizers and energy conversion losses of the all power processing units. The resulted typical thruster performance is 297 μN thrust with 1100 s specific impulse by 15.1 W total power consumption.

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