A scaling methodology for high-power magnetically shielded Hall thrusters

The past two decades have seen an increasing interest in Hall thrusters in space propulsion, thanks to their favorable performance characteristics with respect to a wide variety of missions of current and future interest and to the signifcant extension in operational life potential achievable with magnetic shielding. Nevertheless, the physics underlying their behavior is complex and not yet fully understood, limiting the practical applications of models based on frst principles due to their inability to self-consistently predict the device performance. Fortunately, modern Hall thrusters were developed through a lengthy process of gradual refnement, and thus they represent convenient reference devices to design new thrusters using appropriately defned scaling criteria. The objective of this work is to propose a new scaling methodology, especially intended for magnetically shielded high-power Hall thrusters. To this purpose, a novel phenomenological model for shielded thrusters is presented and discussed. This model includes free coefcients, whose values are chosen based on the agreement with the empirical data collected in a specially created high-power Hall thruster database. The proposed methodology features a new reference thruster and aims at keeping unchanged its main plasma intensive parameters in a scaling transformation. The possibility of creating performance maps at constant discharge power, which show how the scaling results vary with the channel dimensions, is also proposed as a preliminary design tool.