Low power thrust measurements of the water electrolysis Hall effect thruster

We propose that a Hall effect thruster could be modified to operate on the products of water electrolysis. Such a thruster would exploit the low cost and high storability of water while producing gaseous hydrogen and oxygen in-situ as they are required. By supplying the anode with oxygen and the cathode with hydrogen, the poisoning of the cathode is mitigated. The water electrolysis Hall effect thruster (WET-HET) has been designed to demonstrate this concept. The dimensions of the WET-HET have been optimized for oxygen operation using PlasmaSim, a zero-dimensional particle in cell code. We present the first direct thrust measurements of the WET-HET. A hanging pendulum style thrust balance is used to measure the thrust of the WET-HET while operating in the Boltzmann vacuum facility within the Imperial Plasma Propulsion Laboratory. For this test the beam was neutralized using a filament plasma bridge neutralizer operating on krypton. We find thrust, specific impulse, and thrust efficiency all increase linearly with power for values between 400 and 1050 W. Increasing the mass flow rate from 0.96 to 1.85 mg/s increases thrust at the expense of specific impulse. Changing mass flow rate was found to have little impact on the thrust efficiency over this range. An optimal radial magnetic flux density of 403 G at the exit plane is found. Further increases to the magnetic field beyond this point were found to decrease the thrust, specific impulse and thrust efficiency, whereas the discharge voltage increased monotonically with increasing magnetic field for a given input power. It was found that the experimental thruster performance was lower than the simulation results from PlasmaSim. However, the general trends in performance as a function of power and propellant mass flow rate were preserved. We attribute a portion of this discrepancy to the inability of the simulation to model the energy absorbed by the covalent bond of the oxygen molecule. For the powers and mass flow rates surveyed we measured thrust ranging from 4.52$$\pm 0.18\,$$ ± 0.18 to 8.45$$\pm 0.18\,$$ ± 0.18 mN, specific impulse between 324$$\pm 12\,$$ ± 12 and 593$$\pm 12\,$$ ± 12 s, and anode thrust efficiencies between 1.34$$\pm 0.10\,$$ ± 0.10 and 2.34$$\pm 0.10\,$$ ± 0.10 %.