Investigation into the thermal effect of the LIPS-200 ion thruster plume

The distribution of the thermal effects of the ion thruster plume are essential for estimating the influence of the thruster plume, improving the layout of the spacecraft, and for the thermal shielding of critical sensitive components. In order to obtain the heat flow distribution in the plume of the LIPS-200 xenon ion thruster, an experimental study of the thermal effects of the plume has been conducted in this work,with a total heat flow sensor and a radiant heat flow sensor over an axial distance of 0.5–0.9 m and a thruster angle of 0°–60°. Combined with a Faraday probe and a retarding potential analyzer, the thermal accommodation coefficient of the sensor surface in the plume is available. The results of the experiment show that the xenon ion thruster plume heat flow is mainly concentrated within a range of15°. The total and radial heat flow of the plume downstream of the thruster gradually decreases along the axial and radial directions, with the corresponding values of 11.78 k W m^(-2) and 0.3 k W m^(-2) for the axial 0.5 m position, respectively. At the same position, the radiation heat flow accounts for a very small part of the total heat flow, approximately 3%–5%. The thermal accommodation factor is0.72–0.99 over the measured region. Furthermore, the PIC and DSMC methods based on the Maxwell thermal accommodation coefficient model(EX-PWS) show a maximum error of 28.6% between simulation and experiment for LIPS-200 ion thruster plume heat flow, which, on the one hand, provides an experimental basis for studying the interaction between the ion thruster and the spacecraft, and on the other hand provides optimization of the ion thruster plume simulation model.

Stable Runge-Kutta discontinuous Galerkin solver for hypersonic rarefied gaseous flow based on 2D Boltzmann kinetic model equations

A stable high-order Runge-Kutta discontinuous Galerkin(RKDG) scheme that strictly preserves positivity of the solution is designed to solve the Boltzmann kinetic equation with model collision integrals. Stability is kept by accuracy of velocity discretization, conservative calculation of the discrete collision relaxation term, and a limiter. By keeping the time step smaller than the local mean collision time and forcing positivity values of velocity distribution functions on certain points, the limiter can preserve positivity of solutions to the cell average velocity distribution functions. Verification is performed with a normal shock wave at a Mach number 2.05, a hypersonic flow about a two-dimensional(2D) cylinder at Mach numbers 6.0 and 12.0, and an unsteady shock tube flow. The results show that, the scheme is stable and accurate to capture shock structures in steady and unsteady hypersonic rarefied gaseous flows. Compared with two widely used limiters, the current limiter has the advantage of easy implementation and ability of minimizing the influence of accuracy of the original RKDG method.