Fully Electromagnetic PIC/MCC Simulation for an Ion Thruster Discharge Chamber*

Due to their high efficiency, high specific impulse, long lifetime and high reliability, ion thrusters have already become the research focus of the international electrical propulsion. In this work, a 2D axisymmetric Particle-in-Cell plus Monte Carlo Collision (PIC/MCC) numerical model was developed to simulate the plasma inside an ion thruster discharge chamber. The PIC method was used to describe the collective behavior of plasma, and detailed ionization collision mechanism between electrons and neutral gas was described by MCC method. Besides external electric and magnetic field, a fully electromagnetic model was solved to determine the effect of the electromagnetic fields in the particle tracking. Compared with previous electrostatic models, the effect of time-varying electromagnetic fields on charged particles was considered in a self-consistent way in this model. The numerical results such as single xenon ion, primary and secondary electron number density distributions, energy values obtained from this work are reasonable. New speed-up techniques including GPU parallel computing and multi-grid method will be used.