Ablation modeling and simulation for pulsed plasma thruster

To further reveal the working mechanism of Pulsed Plasma Thruster (PPT), the distribution of ohmic-heating energy was analyzed, and an improved ablation model was proposed based on conservation of energy and the energy equation of magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) equations revised. The working process of LES-6 PPT was simulated by use of the one-dimensional MHD program and the temporal variation of some parameters such as the velocity map, discharge ablation mass and impulse bit have been obtained. The results exhibit that the improved model can correctly reveal the working process of PPT and the simulated values of the exit velocity and impulse bit fit well with the experimental values while that of discharge ablation mass shows large error. It is also shown that the impulse bit almost increases linearly with the discharge energy and discharge ablation mass increases with a non-linear correlation while the capacity of the capacitors varies.