Preliminary design of helicon plasma thruster by means of particle swarm optimization

Radio-frequency and Helicon Plasma Thrusters have emerged as viable electric propulsion systems due to their high plasma density, thrust density, and useful life. Helicon Plasma Thruster (HPT) is a very attractive technology because it could use many propellants and does not require hollow cathodes or grids, overcoming their associated critical erosion problem and extending the thruster’s lifetime to some tens of thousands of hours. Despite the fact that high-power HPTs have reached 30% efficiency in laboratory configurations, sophisticated numerical models are required for a deeper understanding of the main plasma phenomena and for the preliminary design to increase the very low HPT’s efficiency (3–7%) typical of the low-power class thrusters. The paper focuses on the development of a model for the low-medium power range (50–2000 W) of HPTs design. Starting from Lafleur’s model, it has been improved with the hypothesis of neutral gas being expelled at the real thruster’s wall operative temperature (300–600 K) in place of the more frequent laboratory temperature assumption (300 K). This hypothesis affects total thrust and specific impulse by about 10%. A parametric analysis of the slenderness ratio (chamber length-to-radius) has been conducted. The results showed that slender configurations lead to higher efficiencies. Downstream from the numerical model validation, a tool for the global design has been built with the Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) technique that leads to optimal thruster configuration. This tool has been used to design a 4 mN HPT tuning the PSO in order to minimize the dimensions and the weight according to the assigned mission constraints (i.e., power, thrust, and weight). A total efficiency of 10.4% results.