NUMERICAL EVALUATION OF THE PERFORMANCE OF HELICON PLASMA THRUSTERS

This thesis aims at presenting the performance evaluation of a type of electric thrusters, the Helicon Plasma Thruster (HPT), specifically in the 50-100W power range for CubeSat applications, through means of a 0-D Global Source Model for the simulation of the plasma source and a numerical particle model, ProPIC, to simulate the acceleration region and calculate the efficiency. In practice the focus is on exploiting ProPIC 3D simulation of non-axisymmetric magnetic field’s topologies to evaluate how they affect the performance in terms of propulsive figures of merit, due to the influence on the charged particles’ trajectories and velocities, however the magnetic nozzle size also represents an important variable in the analyses. The whole process involves implementing the magnetic field's topologies, validating the codes with comparative tests and finally optimizing the HPT by varying all the aforementioned parameters.