In this paper, a two-dimensional physical model is established in a Hall thruster sheath region to investigate the influences of the electron temperature and the propellant on the sheath potential drop and the secondary electron emission in the Hall thruster, by the particle-in-cell(PIC) method. The numerical results show that when the electron temperature is relatively low, the change of sheath potential drop is relatively large, the surface potential maintains a stable value and the stability of the sheath is good. When the electron temperature is relatively high, the surface potential maintains a persistent oscillation, and the stability of the sheath reduces. As the electron temperature increases, the secondary electron emission coefficient on the wall increases. For three kinds of propellants(Ar, Kr, and Xe), as the ion mass increases the sheath potentials and the secondary electron emission coefficients reduce in sequence.
The distribution of magnetic field in Hall thruster channel has significant effect on its discharge process and wall plasma sheath characteristics. By creating physical models for the wall sheath region and adopting two-dimensional particle in cell simulation method,this work aims to investigate the effects of magnitude and direction of magnetic field and ion velocity on the plasma sheath characteristics. The simulation results show that magnetic field magnitudes have small impact on the sheath potential and the secondary electron emission coefficient,magnetic azimuth between the magnetic field direction and the channel radial direction is proportional to the absolute value of the sheath potential,but inversely proportional to the secondary electron emission coefficient. With the increase of the ion incident velocity,secondary electron emission coefficient is enhanced,however,electron density number,sheath potential and radial electric field are decreased. When the boundary condition is determined,with an increase of the simulation area radial scale,the sheath potential oscillation is aggravated,and the stability of the sheath is reduced.
This article is to discuss the bilinear and linear immersed finite element(IFE)solutions generated from the algebraic multigrid solver for both stationary and moving interface problems.For the numerical methods based on finite difference formulation and a structured mesh independent of the interface,the stiffness matrix of the linear system is usually not symmetric positive-definite,which demands extra efforts to design efficient multigrid methods.On the other hand,the stiffness matrix arising from the IFE methods are naturally symmetric positive-definite.Hence the IFE-AMG algorithm is proposed to solve the linear systems of the bilinear and linear IFE methods for both stationary and moving interface problems.The numerical examples demonstrate the features of the proposed algorithms,including the optimal convergence in both L 2 and semi-H1 norms of the IFE-AMG solutions,the high efficiency with proper choice of the components and parameters of AMG,the influence of the tolerance and the smoother type of AMG on the convergence of the IFE solutions for the interface problems,and the relationship between the cost and the moving interface location.
