Plume Control of a Cusped Field Thruster
The cusped field thruster uses several permanent ring magnets of alternating polarity to create a multistage cusp magnetic topology. It has demonstrated a long lifetime because of reduced plasma losses to the discharge channel surface. However, the high beam divergence problem has not been solved in this type of thruster. The purpose of this technical note is to describe a plume control method to reduce its plume angle. The results show that the magnetic field intensity in the plume region and the shape of the last separatrix have great influence on plume divergence.
Effect of the variable cross-section channel on performance of a cusped field thruster at low power
The cusped field thruster has drawn much attention from many institutions due to its wide thrust range, high impulse, and long lifetime. However, lots of experimental results reveal that the cusped field thruster at low power has a poor performance. A cusped field thruster with a variable cross-section channel by putting a ceramic spacer in the channel is introduced in this paper, aimed at improving the thruster performance at low power. The DSMC results validate that the upstream atom density can be increased by a spacer, especially near the wall. Based on simulated results, spacers are put into different positions of the channel. The experimental results show that a suitable spacer can enhance thruster performance at low power, which can be confirmed by the results that the anode efficiency can achieve 40% at 400 V anode voltage and 20 sccm gas flow rate by contrast to 35% without a spacer under the same condition.
Persistence and Change in Minkowski Spacetime
There are famously two main metaphysics of persistence, namely three and four-dimensionalism. Both yield a particular solution to the so called puzzle of change. I argue that typical three-dimensionalist solutions to the puzzle face insurmountable difficulties even in the simplest relativistic setting, that of Minkowski spacetime