Design of the Code ‘BUMBLEBEE-EP’ and Its Application to Ion Thruster*

The PIC/MCC simulation code ‘Bumblebee-EP’ has been developed for the numerical research of ion thruster. It includes a friendly user-interface module that provides a powerful 3D solid-modeling front end, a 3D FEM meshes and graphical computational postprocessing and three physics simulators including the Discharge Simulator (DS), the Ion Optics Simulator (IOS) and the Plume Simulator (PS). Both DS and PS simulators used the 2D3V PIC/MCC method. The new 3D FEM-PIC algorithm was proposed to describe the physical process of ion extraction in grids and applied to IOS simulator. In this paper, the design of the code ‘Bumblebee-EP’ was introduced, the theory and numerical algorithms of the three physics simulators were described. The comparisons between MAGIC and Bumblebee-EP have been done to give the numerical validation. The characteristics of the ionization in discharge chamber, the ion extraction process with the CEX collision, and the formation of plume were simulated using Bumblebee-EP.