Numerical Modeling of plasma flow in an Electrohydrodynamic thruster with two-cathode electrode arrangement

Abstract

corona discharge which had been considered undesired before, has become popular for different uses in the past decades; including space thrusters. The basic corona discharge has a simple setup including two electrodes with unequal cross-sections; one of which connected to a high voltage and the other connected to ground or opposite voltage. By changing the number of electrodes, the efficiency of corona discharge can be improved. In this paper, number of electrodes have been changed from 2 to 3 in order to study an electrohydrodynamic thruster. Flow characteristics have been studied by solving the electrostatics and Navier-Stokes equations by finite element method (FEM). The results show that with increasing the number of cathodes the thrust, electric current and thrust efficiency will also increase. In similar condition and geometry, maximum produced velocity resulted by applying any electric potential to anode, increases by about 30% in comparison with one-cathode setup.

Keywords

• thruster
• corona discharge
• electrohydrodynamic
• numerical modeling
• cold plasma