Magnetic Field Design for a Strongly Improved PHALL Thruster

In this article, we are going to go through some steps that we took in the refining of engineering work related to the development of a permanent magnet Hall thruster. The use of permanent magnets in these thrusters is mainly related to the decrease of used power for propulsion, especially important for low power thrusters as for micro-satellites. The advantage of our chosen configuration is that the magnetic field can be used either perpendicular or parallel to the thruster channel walls, whereas in the last case the generated erosion forces are strongly reduced by at least three orders of magnitude. We are going to show how each magnetic field configuration affects the generated plasma and consequently the generated propulsion force and efficiency. (paper)