With the rapid development of space technology, the scale of human space exploration is expanding significantly. However, the growing demand for deep space travel cannot be met with conventional chemical engines. Thus, the need for new mechanisms for providing jet thrust, including electric motors, becomes clear. Electric propulsion technology has significant advantages over traditional chemical engines in deep space flight due to its characteristics such as high specific impulse, small size, long service life. A negative feature of electric motors can be called low thrust, however, firstly, in open space this is insignificant and, secondly, the thrust of electric motors can be significantly increased, and for this, there are reserves available at the current level of technology development. Ways to increase the thrust of electric ion thrusters will be detailed and discussed in this work. The increase in the power of ion engines is limited to a large extent by the erosion of the control grids; the ion flow hits the surface of the solid material of the control grid electrode with energetic ions and gradually leads to the failure of this electrode. In this work, the authors will show that the use of field emission as a source of electron beams ionizing the working medium can solve the problem of erosion of control electrodes, due to which it will be possible to significantly increase the strength of the working fields for ion engines, which in turn will increase the specific impulse, efficiency, flow rate and power of the ion engine as a whole.
Increasing the specific impulse of the ion engine by zone engineering of the solid-state field cathode