Gridded Ion Thruster - Lifetime Study
Problem
Gridded ion optic systems experience material erosion due to high-energy ion impingement, leading to various failure modes after several thousand hours of operation. Thus, thrusters need to demonstrate that they will reach the required time by running 1.5x the required operational hours for a given mission in dedicated test facilities.
Such experimental campaigns require:
- Maintaining expensive ground test facilities
- Securing power supply for thousands of hours
- Permanent involvement of personnel during test
- Struggling to replicate orbital conditions
Conducting such experiments for final lifetime qualification are extremely resource-intensive in terms of time & cost of infrastructure and workforce.
Solution
Reduce the total duration of cumulated thruster lifetime test campaigns by trustworthy simulations with VSTRAP-GIT. It is already common practice to perform reduced lifetime qualification campaigns for missions with thruster lifetime requirements that are totally impractical for fully fledged qualification campaign. Lifetime simulations with VSTRAP-GIT get you:
- Autonomous configuration and execution of successive gridded ion optics simulations
- Autonomous steady-state detection at all stages of the simulations
- Autonomous modification of eroding surface geometries
VSTRAP-GIT is designed to make complex engineering work simple and efficient. After adjusting the default parameters to the specifications of your thruster, you are only 5 simple parameters away from your lifetime simulation campaign, of which 4 are end-of-life criteria.
Results
High resolution erosion diagnostics
Assess behavior and impact of primary ions (top) and charge exchange ions (bottom) at any moment in time
Monitor the integrity of the acceleration grid
Holistic overview of various coupled phenomena
Analyze flow field changes due to barrel erosion
Assess the electron back-streaming failure mode
Natively available visualization capabilities
Visualization of the barrel erosion during post-processing
Visualization of the Pits & Grooves pattern during post-processing
Summary
VSTRAP-GIT enables comprehensive easy-to-use and validated thruster lifetime modelling capabilities for a broad range of thruster operation time.
- Allow fast exploration of design variations and system sensitivities
- Provides a full lifetime simulation on a regular workstation in days instead of years
- Assess different failure modes including barrel erosion, pits & grooves pattern and electron back-streaming
