Accession Number:
ADA627178
Title:
Boltzmann Transport in Hybrid PIC HET Modeling
Descriptive Note:
Conference paper with briefing charts
Corporate Author:
AIR FORCE RESEARCH LAB EDWARDS AFB CA ROCKET PROPULSION DIV
Personal Author(s):
Report Date:
2015-07-01
Pagination or Media Count:
29.0
Abstract:
Electron transport models are a key source of uncertainty inhibiting first-principal simulation of Hall-effect thruster HET physics. Fluid electron models depend heavily on the electron mobility tensor, generally constructed using semi-empirical relationships which require user-adjustable tuning parameters and are based on the assumption of an electron velocity distribution function in local thermal equilibrium. Recently, work in the field of gaseous electronics has produced a variety of self-consistent electron swarm codes, such as the Magboltz code, focused on directly solving the steady Boltzmann transport equation including both electromagnetic and collisional processes. In parallel, the community have also developed extensive electron collision databases that include detailed elastic and inelastic collision cross sections for electrons with various gases. In this work, we investigate whether Magboltz can reproduce experimentally observed mobility trends derived from HPHall, a workhorse hybrid-PIC HET simulation code.
Subject Categories:
- Operations Research
- Plasma Physics and Magnetohydrodynamics
- Electric and Ion Propulsion